


In the House

by ana_m_q



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-13 18:14:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 25,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21199643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ana_m_q/pseuds/ana_m_q
Summary: House centric story. House is in prison, thinking about his life, what he went through, where he is going. The setting is between the end of "20 Vicodin" and the beginning of "Transplant".





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story in 2013. 
> 
> I have written three House stories. In them House goes through personal changes, meaning that House in the first story is not the same as in the last. Despite of this, the stories can be read separately and not by any order.
> 
> Chronological order:
> 
> \- In the House;  
\- On a Certain Night;  
\- One Afternoon.

_Midnight, an old house,_  
_Where nothing stirs but a mouse_

_(W. B. Yeats)_

* * *

I

Half past three in the morning. Silence. The man was lying down on the mattress but was not sleeping. His right hand couldn't stop moving along his thigh. It was a constant, rhythmic motion: down, up, up, down, down, up. The man had taken the vicodin pill hours ago, it seemed, but he couldn't feel its effects yet.

He had his eyes closed. His mind was filled with the colour red. It was the pain. Only the pain existed. As if someone had punctured the leg with an hot iron, ripping flesh, muscles, tendons, to the bone and beyond the bone. His flesh was on fire. All his being was on fire.

The man wanted to scream but no sound came out. The man wanted to move but he kept quiet. Only his hand moved. From top to bottom, from bottom to top. Relentless as the destiny.

Everything was bright red. In times like these he only wished he could rip his leg apart in one single blow. Finish all the pain forever. The man thought about this possibility for a moment. He imagined how he felt if someone chopped off his leg, and the imaginary pain allied itself to the real pain so even thinking about that possibility became unbearable. It was with this that he lived since... _forever?_... since he had the infarction. In another life, it seemed to him.

He only had to wait for the vicodin to kick in, despite the fact that patience was not one of his major virtues. "kick in, son of a bitch, kick in", he thought, with his teeth clenched shut. His will still remained untameable.

His brow was sprinkled with tiny drops of sweat, some of them were running down his neck, back, belly. The man felt sticky in that stuffy air. He tried to think of something else but the thoughts were confusing, without substance, from the red, shadows of figures, that he could not identify, appeared and disappeared. The pain reigned supreme, everything else was insignificant. He was insignificant. _The genius_. An open wound made of suffering. _The genius_.

What else to do? Only to wait, to practice patience, like the buddhists monks had taught him. "To practice patience". Fuck all religions and their teachings, their techniques of control. He was in hell. "Stop that, you went through worst things so just hang in there."

Time passed. How much time, the man didn't know. Time passed and the pain changed. It was now a slight burning sensation, continuous but much more easy to endure. "Finally", he thought with relief. God bless Vicodin.

His hand stopped moving along the thigh and immobilized above the scar. He could feel it below the trousers. An ugly, mishapen thing, made of deep grooves. One finger of his hand, very slowly, almost absent-minded, started to touch it, to follow its crevices and bumps. The scar was the other thing. He could muffle the pain, he could, sometimes, even forget about it completely but the scar, the scar was always there. In his leg and in the deepness of his thoughts. _The mark of Cain_, said one voice in his mind. The man smiled at this melodramatic remark. Things were improving. He could now laugh at himself. Not everything was lost. All of a sudden the man felt more alive. He drew a deep breath and let the silence wrap around him. After a while, the man opened his eyes and the dark welcomed him.

If not for the darkness and if he wasn't alone, one could have seen that the man had blue eyes. A blue of one thousand hues, that could change with the light. A volatile blue. Like the man himself. If one were curious, or courageous, enough to look inside those eyes he would have seen the essence of the man, because it was there, for all the world to see. The man's soul was in his eyes. But nobody ever had wanted to look, or if they had looked they had not understood, or if they had understood they had forgotten with time, or... The truth was that many times people got distracted by the man's voice.

His voice was capable of saying cruel things, humiliating things. She took pleasure in its repertoire of jokes and metaphors, ready for every occasion, the more imaginative and outrageous the better. The voice asked, demanded, attention. Through her, the man could destroy a person with a truth or manipulate another with a lie. The voice was, at the same time, the organ of the irony, of the intelligence, of the humour, of the certainties, of the lies, of the truths, of Power. It was through the voice that the man showed to others how stupid, boring, hypocrites, liars, useless, pathetic, they were. It was through the voice that he confronted them with their mistakes, with whom they really were. The voice was eloquent, powerful, arrogant, authoritarian, inescapable. She didn't allowed discussions or doubts.

Only rarely, very rarely, the voice assumed a calm, soft tone. Even more rarely she could become a murmur. In those moment, eyes and voice were one and the same. Those were the moments of private confessions, witnessed by only a few. The moments of "I'm sorry", "I love you", "I'm hurt", "I'm damaged", "I don't know", "I need her". The moments when the man forgot the others and looked inside himself, to the truth that was there.


	2. Chapter 2

II

Outside, the city, full of people, noise, lights, music, voices, cars, movement, life. And death. There were no dead hours for the unstoppable organism that was the city. Stuck in a cocoon of darkness and silence, the man was thinking of what was going on outside of the prison walls. Bars, discos, strip-clubs and other such places, legal and illegal, were still open, full to the brim of people dancing, drinking, smoking, talking, laughing, singing, shouting, kissing, pushing each other... punching each other... falling, throwing up... A huge human mass that repelled him and, at the same time, fascinated him.

The man knew every corner of the city. The respectable ones and the others. He had pride in that knowledge. Pride in the fact that he could go with the same ease through PPTH's corridors as through the darkest and most forgotten parts of the city. In the hospital as in his night walks, life in its many facets paraded before the man's eyes. Life had no secrets for him. Nor humanity. He had ceased to have any illusions about both of them long ago. "There is no unconditional love, only unconditional need."

Humanity was strange but in the end predictable. Almost always predictable. Sometimes surprises happened. A cheating husband confessing his sins to his wife, a father willing to die for his son, a daughter telling her mother that she was going to die... But those were exceptions. The majority of people lied to protect something, almost always themselves. It was better to live believing in lies, safer. The truth was cruel. After the truth was said things were never the same again. Like the time when the man had told his father that he was not really his father. That was one of those moments when he probably should have kept his mouth shut but the anger had spurred him to talk. He had wanted his father to know. He had wanted his father to know from that moment that there was nothing more that connected them. All strings were cut. He was only his mother's husband. Period. Genes matter. John House was not his father.

The man remembered the precise moment he had deduced that. A deduction that he immediately took as the unquestionable truth. He was twelve years old. Many years later he had gotten the confirmation with a DNA test. Between the discovery and the certainty, years had passed when the man had hated his father, an authoritarian marine that beat the crap out of him at the smallest sign of disobedience, at the first sign of rebelliousness. And there had been many and various. The man had made sure of it. After all it was a question of pride. If he was going to be punished in any case then it was better to be punished because of a big thing, a thing worthwhile, the man had thought. It had been a struggle of wills, a struggle that the man had lost as a child but it taught him to despise every authority, every rules except his own. And yet...

And yet, the man had never ceased to call John House "father". "Something had to change", wasn't it what a patient had told him once? But by what other name should he have called him? "The man who sleeps with my mother"? "The man that beats me as soon as I raise my head or arrive late to dinner"? Too long, too unpractical. "Father" he had been, "father" he will remain forever. And now that the man had reached an understanding with John House's memory, that maybe he even had forgiven him, there was less reason to change. Father. F-A-T-H-E-R. The man spelled mentally each letter to feel their weight. John House was his father. He had realized that during the funeral. What had he said during the eulogy? "Maybe if he'd been a better father I'd been a better son. But I am what I am because of him, for better or for worse." But that had not been all. "He loved doing what he did. He saw his work as some kind of sacred calling. More important than any relationship." A sacred calling. While remembering these words, the man recognised that the same thing could be said about him. He also saw what he did as a sacred call. Or he had seen it that way, he didn't know anymore. You still think of it as a sacred call or you wouldn't be stuck in here. Maybe... The man stopped thinking for a moment, crossed his arms above his belly and just listened to the silence.


	3. Chapter 3

III

Heat and sand were the words that first came to his mind. And pyramids. Heat, sand and pyramids, that was Egypt for him. The man remembered when he had seen the Great Pyramids for the first time. He was six years old. Huge and majestic, they emerged above the sands. Eternal. Giant tombs for men that had believed they could live forever. The men were mummies now and some of them were still there, inside those giant masses of stone, proving that there are things in this world that remain unchanged.

The man's first impulse when he had saw the pyramids had been to climb them until he had reached the very top. And he would have done just that if it had been possible. He had imagined how the view must be from so high a place. The seemingly unending desert, the people below like ants, the Sun above. Trying to touch the Sun. Time. Through a child's eye he had felt the stretching of time. He had imagined that same scenery but in Antiquity, when the Egyptian Empire existed still. He had seen it all once in a movie. Slaves pushing and pulling huge rocks, sweat and blood running down their backs and merciless men with whips forcing them to never stop, to move on, to always move on. Above all this, the Sun spreading its heat through the landscape. The same Sun that he saw flickering between the little fingers of his hand was the same that had witnessed the construction of the great pyramids, that had witnessed the rise and fall of the Egyptian Empire, the rise and fall of all Antiquity. What were the pyramids to the Sun? To the star that already existed when Earth was in its infancy. But even the Sun would have an end. Everything has an end.

After he had seen the exterior, the man had visited the interior of one of those pyramids. That had fascinated him too, but in a different way. Walking down, ever down, through narrow paths to chambers that opened to other chambers, always deeper into the heart of the pyramid. He had stop noticing the paintings on the walls, the sarcophagus and other objects scattered here and there. In the stale air, he had imagined himself being buried there, among the dust and the dark, covered by stone, forgotten by all, forever. There had been something terrifying and, at the same time, strangely conforting about that idea.

When he had arrived home, the first thing he did was grab all the books about the ancient egyptians he was able to find and proceeded to read them all with a systematic enthusiasm. Everything about egyptian civilization had been a matter of curiosity to him: the daily life, the society, the economics, the arts, the architecture, the politics, the wars, the people, the religion, the medicine. He had paid particular attention to the egyptian use of venoms and their method of embalming. He even performed some hidden experiments with small animals, putting into practice what he had learnt in the books. Soon he had become a specialist on the subject, as much as a six years old child can become a specialist in anything except trouble.

From Egypt he had brought a small strange shaped wood box that had inside reagents and other chemicals, and that box, or better, one particular item in that box, had been very useful, years later, in the finding of a diagnosis and in the apprehension of a woman. The man smiled while thinking about that episode. It had been a genius deduction on his part. _Another one_. But that case in particular had given him a special pleasure because he had a person not a disease as an adversary. He still remembered the astonishment on the woman's face when she saw the fingers of her hand turn slowly purple proof that she had been poisoning her husband with gold. Even with this evidence before her eyes, she still had denied the murder attempt, of course. She had said that it couldn't be, that she loved her husband. But the man knew that didn't mean anything. He knew that a person could kill out of love as much as out of hate. What the man didn't know at the time, what he couldn't possibly have imagined, was that he would be the victim of the same thing, one day.


	4. Chapter 4

IV

When the man was sixteen years old, his father was stationed on one of Japan's islands. It was on that island that the man encountered the person that would become, in a way, his spiritual father.

He had been doing mountain climbing with a friend when the accident happened. His friend lost his hold on a loose rock, fell, and had to be sent to the hospital. And it had been at the hospital that the man had spotted _him_. A disheveled looking individual dressed in a green dirty uniform, pushing a bucket full of water at the same time he was scrubbing the corridor's floor. The man had stared at his back, watching him, for a very long time.

It was a busy corridor, with many people passing through: doctors; nurses; firemen; people carrying other people on gurneys. Quick steps on the pavement. The cleaning man, always with his head bowed down, stepped aside whenever a person was in risk of colliding with him. He was trying to be inconspicuous as possible but he shouldn't had bothered, because during the whole time the man had been watching him nobody had spoken to the stranger, nor greeted him, nor looked at him, not even had thrown him a quick glance. It was as if the stranger was invisible. The man had found that fascinating. Afterwards, he had discovered that that bizarre character was a doctor and a _buraku_, one of Japan's untouchables.

Later, when the man's friend caught an infection and nobody knew the reason, the doctors had no other option than to call that stranger, the stranger that spent all his days cleaning, sweeping, rubbing the hospital's floors and performing other menial jobs. They had to listen to him and they had to follow his orders. And, in the end, the cleaning man had solved the case.

There was something romantic and heroic in that person and in his peculiar situation that had caught the man's imagination. Here was this guy that, by all effects, didn't exist, a guy that was estranged from society, that had no contact with other human beings, but whenever necessity arose, he was the most important person in the world. The only one that mattered, just because he was always right. And what was more important than to be always right? What was more important than to solve things? What was more important than to be someone special in an ordinary world? What was more important than to do what needed to be done, regardless of the consequences? What was society's conventions compared to that? What was being considered to be "one of us" compared to that? The man had seen in the _buraku_ a kindred spirit, someone that had been put into this world to bring order. A genius.

From that moment on the man had known what would be his future. He would become a doctor, the best doctor of all. He would become the one that would hold the key to the mystery in his hand.

And that had come to pass. Exactly like the man had planned. Nevertheless, not without some rocks in the way. Being the man he was, it would have been surprising if that would not have been so.

During his college years, at every opportunity, in all situations, the man had not wasted a chance to challenge teachers, to take things to the limit, to test his colleagues' honour just to see of what metal they were made of. That kind of behaviour had earned him many enemies on the campus and, in the end, had him expelled from his first medical school. But nobody, from colleagues to teachers, ever had any doubts, that this was a person that someday would become an exceptional doctor.

The man had ended up choosing Nephrology and Infectious Diseases as his specialties. The last one had been an old interest of his propelled by his numerous travels to the Far East and to the tropics. It also had been during his college days that he had met...

At this thought, the man moved on the mattress, feeling uncomfortable. The pain had increased a little in intensity. He was going through thoughts that he knew would not end well. In this looking backwards into his own life, the time had not yet come to think of the woman responsible for him being in there. _Her, responsible? What about you?_ Whatever. But, on second thought, sooner or later she would have to appear, and any time was good as another.

It had been in college that he had met Cuddy. He remembered very well the moment he had laid eyes on her and even what he had said to her. The man had the uncanny and sometimes unnerving, ability of perceiving who a person was just by observing small details like the walk, the smell, a certain bending of the neck, a particular look, the arch of the brow, the inflexions of the voice, the position of the hands. The majority of people he met, he thought of them as stupid, a bunch of idiots unworthy of his attention, but that had not been the case with her. Cuddy had caught his interest from the start. She was pretty, intelligent, ambitious, studious but not too studious that she didn't like to party now and then, had a great body (an essential detail). There had been something about her that had intrigued him and he had wanted to find out what it was.

Cuddy was a person of great moral integrity, to the point of inflexibility. That made a great contrast with the man himself who, throughout time, had built a system of valours flexible enough to permit him to move at ease in accordance with the circumstances. The same thing hadn't happened with Cuddy. With her, it was the circumstances that had to bend to her will, which had led inevitably to disappointments because life simply didn't work that way. The man had found that out very early. Cuddy had never seem to be able to grasp that simple but essential detail, that life has its own laws that were independent of her will and desires. Maybe that's where the problem rested, the big difference between the two, the reason why they hadn't functioned together. Or maybe not. The man didn't know and, at this precise moment, he was not interested in finding out. It was too late and thinking about it would only lead to more suffering. And, after all, hadn't he put an end to the case? A _definitive_ end?

Be that as it may, the thoughts kept coming and the man let them come. Maybe he was too tired to resist them, or maybe he had decided that night was the right night to solve certain questions in his head, the right night to put the house in order, so to speak.

Between him and Cuddy there had been, from the start, a mutual attraction, at the same time sexual, emotional and intellectual. What had happened between them had been strong but brief. The man had been expelled on the day following the only night they had spent together, and when he had seen Cuddy again years had passed. He was already a doctor and she was on her way to become the youngest female Dean of Medicine in the country. When she had finally reached that goal he had not been surprised, having surmised way before that an administrative career was her deepest desire, her biggest ambition and that she would not rest until she achieved her dream.

His desire, on the other hand, had pointed in a different direction. He had wanted to be a doctor with a capital D, to work in the field, to deal with diseases on a daily basis, to make a difference, to save lives. To administer a hospital was for those that weren't competent enough, courageous enough to deal with patients, to take risks, to make mistakes, to make the right choice, to have someone's life in one's hands. The man had wanted to put order into chaos, to find out the mystery that was hidden in a sick body, to make risky decisions in the space of a second, to be able to use his imagination, his intuition, to test his intelligence and his genius. He had wanted to be the saviour, the man that was always right, the _buraku_. He had wanted to have _the _power, the real power, the power that was much more substantial than running a hospital, putting on a suit and a tie, handling money, going to beneficence dinners, being groveled by subordinates. In this matter the man had been much more ambitious than Cuddy.

In truth, the man's ambition had no bounds. Just like him, it was excessive, crossed every border, it was like a river that overflowed its banks. That's why every single failure, every single death, had been a catastrophe that the man had never forgotten. This, in spite of the fact, as he once told some students, that it was impossible to save everyone, and that sooner or later a doctor would err, and that mistake would cost someone's life. All this was true... for the others. The man was in another place and in that place the mistakes were only admissible if they led to the Truth, because the Truth was all that mattered to him.


	5. Chapter 5

V

_Everybody lies._ That was the man's motto. Almost since forever, definitely since he had the infarction. That cursed day that had changed everything. That had changed him.

A person's life has certain moments, decisive moments, when things cannot go back to the way they were. The moment of the infarction had been one of those moments.

There had been a life before the infarction and a life after the infarction. Before the infarction, the man could walk, run, practice sports without limitations. After the infarction, he only could walk with the help of a cane; running and jumping were luxuries that he could not afford. Before the infarction he lived with a woman, Stacy. They were together for five years. After the infarction he lived alone, and Stacy married another. Pain and vicodin were now his companions.

Before the infarction he was whole. After the infarction he was a cripple, with a scar on his thigh. Before the infarction he felt happy. He loved and was loved. The possibilities were endless. After the infarction he became a cynic, a misanthrope, a miserable man.

Before the infarction things made sense, life had a meaning. After the infarction, no.

He had ceased to believe in the existence of a universal order, in a universal justice. The only things he believed now were in humanity's innate selfishness and in its sense of self-preservation. Everything else was a fantasy, it didn't exist. Since the infarction, he had seen life from behind and, for some reason, he couldn't, ever again, manage to look at it from the front. Everything seemed to him crooked, chaotic, false, empty, without meaning. Something somewhere inside of him had been broken.

The truth was one and one only: he had died that day, when they put him in a coma. He had died, and the man that had awakened was another person altogether. A much angrier, more bitter, less tolerant person.

Millions of people went through the same and even worse and they coped, and they moved on with their lives, and, possibly, they even were happy. The man didn't know nor cared. He didn't have any empathy for any cripple that had crossed his way in the past or that would cross his way in the future. They were not _him_. It was as simple as that. The rest of the world was not him. He was unique and his problems were unique. If they resembled other people's problems... well...

To the questions "Who are we?", "Where do we come from?", "Where do we go?", he had thought that if he didn't have the answers at least he knew that there was a possibility of an answer. After the infarction he had lost that certainty. Or maybe the answer to all three of them was: "Who cares?" What was a human being after all? Why so much suffering, so much pain? What are we doing here? He didn't know. Millions are born, live and die every day. Some of them are luckier than others. Some of them are happier, prettier, richer than others. What is the meaning of all this? What is the importance of all this? He saved lives every day. The people he saved were going to die anyway. He only had postponed that moment, that's all.

It hadn't been only the pain, or the leg, that had made him think this way. It had been everything. He was happy, he had a foreseen path before him, he knew what he wanted and then... the chaos that followed – the pain, the diagnosis, the alternatives of treatment, the lie, the betrayal, the impotence, the lack of control... – everything had showed him that the life he had led up until then was an illusion. His desires, his dreams, love itself, hadn't meant anything. Life didn't mean anything.

People only had to live and not think on why they lived. But that was not enough for the man. To live without thinking... just live... just to breathe, to wake up, to go to work, to come from work, to fall in love, to marry, to have children, to have grandchildren, to die... it was not enough for him. He had wanted more. He had wanted, he had needed, something more than this path followed, in a more or less mechanical way, by all human beings since the world began. The infarction had showed him that there was nothing more. That he suffered for nothing. How could he remain the same person after he had realized that? How could he continue, with more or less difficulties, with more or less pain, to live the same life? He had ceased to be in synch with everything and he didn't know how to go back.

From the moment he had arrived home, coming from the hospital, the man had started to prepare, like a warrior prepares for a fight. He had started to build, little by little, almost imperceptibly, the armour that would keep him away from all the others.

The first victim of this plan had been Stacy. It had not been his intention to chase her away. Despite his resentment and his anger towards her for having lied to him, and for having made the decision with which consequences he had to live with till the end of his days, the man still loved her, he still wanted to have a life with her, he still wanted to think, at least, that that possibility existed.

When she finally left, the man had felt hurt but, deep down, he had not been completely surprised. It had been only a matter of time. He never had truly forgiven her and, being the person he was, he had never ceased to call this fact to her attention every moment that he could.

In those early days he couldn't stand seeing anyone, and he couldn't stand being seen by anyone. It had been difficult enough to deal with the pain alone, with the leg, but to also endure, in addition to that, the looks of pity, the awkward attempts to help, the attempts at understanding the cripple? That would have been too much. If he wanted to survive what had happened to him he needed to do it alone. Hence, Stacy's leaving had been a kind of relief, not that he ever would admit that to himself. What he had wanted, deep down, had been for her to stay, for her to hold on. If she loved him, then she had the _obligation_ to stay by his side. "Pain happens when you care". The memory of these words, said by another person, in another time, in another circumstance, made the man laugh to himself, a bitter laugh. He had to laugh at the irony. Stacy couldn't handle the pain, and he couldn't handle her seeing him like that. Two people that loved each other but didn't know how to stay together. Years later, when they finally came to terms with one another, when they finally understood and forgave each other, even then, it hadn't been possible for them to get back together. _He _had made sure of that. A person can't go back. What was lost can't ever be recovered, the man believed. Except for the memories. Those he had managed to recapture. Stacy was no longer a ghost that he thought about with hate. She was a sadness, a longing. A smile appeared on the man's face when he thought of this. Stacy was a secret that he kept inside his heart.


	6. Chapter 6

VI

One cannot go back but the man had tried. Many times. _Too many times_.

After the infarction he had started to hate change, all change. He had grabbed tight to what was left of his old life like a castaway grabs the last board of a ship that had sunken. The house, the piano, the books, the car, the team, the friend. Everything the man had he had tried to preserve to the limits of the impossible. Sometimes he had lost. And now he had lost everything, he thought. At least he had lost what mattered most to him. He didn't know about his team, he didn't know about his friend. He didn't even know if he had a friend anymore.

He believed that the house, the piano, the guitars, the books, the medical journals would be waiting for him, but not his job. Life. Living was a dangerous thing.

Even the other day the man had looked himself in the mirror – a small mirror that barely showed his entire face – trying to figure out if he was still the same. A shadow looking at another shadow. He had looked at his own reflection carefully, clinically. He had looked at every wrinkle, every mark, every bump, trying to find something new, curious to know if the last events of his life had left any exterior signs on his face. He had saw, here and there, bruises, small wounds from the fights in the prison but those were only temporary, they would soon go away and others would take their place, no doubt.

On the map that was his face he saw tiredness, sadness, loneliness, but also determination, stubbornness in keeping himself alive. But he saw nothing that signaled the chaos of what he had been through. No signs that said "here it was when she left me, here it was when I tried to remove the tumors in my leg, here it was when I crashed into her house with my car." Nothing. It looked like his face had not realized what had happened. It was ironic, almost obscene. His life was in shambles and his face was the same? Everything had changed and his face remained the same? The man had smiled at the mirror, a joyless smile.

Fifty-two years old and he was lying in a prison cell. Deep down inside, at the bottom of his soul, the man couldn't shake the inescapable feeling of failure. Something had gone wrong. Somewhere he had made a decision that had put him outside of the tracks. He had taken a shortcut that he shouldn't have taken. It was not the fact that he was a prisoner that bothered him. It was not pleasant, of course, but he was going to survive and, eventually, he was going to get out of there. Maybe it hadn't been a particular moment that had led him to his present situation. Maybe his whole life had been a sequence of events that _inevitably, inexorably_, had led him to his present condition. Maybe the fact that he was there, in that cell, lying in that bed, thinking about these things, was destined to happen since the moment he was born. But the man didn't really believe that. The man didn't believe that there was some thing called Fate. He believed that life was chance and that people lived in perpetual improvisation. However he had to agree that his own nature had made things easy. Maybe if he had been a different man he would not be in that cell. _Almost for sure you would not be in here._

Opposite forces governed his being. To stay, to go; to think, to act; to implode, to explode. He was an agent of order and an agent of chaos. He could be quiet for days or bustling with energy. He could be rough and sweet, serious and a jester, sincere and a liar, cynic and romantic, cruel and sensitive, a child and an adult. He liked being alone and at the same time he yearned for company. He thought himself a genius and at the same time he felt he was shit. All this made part of the complex totality that was the man. Of the imponderability that was Gregory House.

"It's all about speed, isn't it? One thing to another, never standing still", Wilson had told him once. And it was true. There was inside of him a compulsion to move. A force that impelled him to move always forward. Most of the times there was a reason behind that compulsion – a medical case, for example – that guided him. But other times the man felt that the force was its own motor, that the reason behind the motion had lost its meaning long ago and what remained was the motion itself, without a purpose, without a brake, unstoppable like a runaway train. Those times were the most dangerous, to him and to others, because it was not easy to stop the process and the possibility of a disaster was never far away.

There was inside of him a perpetual dissatisfaction. A dissatisfaction and a restlessness. _Powerful combination_. It had been that dissatisfaction that led the man to try to recapture what he was before. To try to cure the leg, or the pain, or both. First it had been the ketamine treatment: failure. Then it had been the methadone: he had to quit that one because it was affecting his cognitive abilities. Later it was the experimental drug that theoretically made muscles grow: another failure.

This last try had almost killed him. The man still remembered the homemade surgery that he had performed in his own bathtub to remove the tumors that had appeared in his leg. It had been a moment of horror in a time of his life when things were moving inexorably in a descending spiral. Always down, always faster.

The man had tried to change externally, he had tried to cure the symptoms, to cure the physical part of the equation. "You want unhappiness to have a cure". Wilson. _Again_. And what if he had wanted it? Was not happiness the cure to unhappiness? Was that not what everybody was doing or trying to do? The reason why they saw psychiatrists, psychologists, and others of the same ilk? The reason why they read self-help books, entered into cults, believed in astrology, believed in God? Because they wanted to be happy, to find some sort of meaning, some order? It was what he had done... in his own way.

The man did not believe that there was a meaning to life and at the same time he needed one desperately ("I want meaning", he remembered saying that in the past). He did not believe that he could change – he was who he was always would always be – but at the same time he wanted to be other desperately. Once in a while he had looked for that meaning and for that change with insistence. Whenever he was drawn by some personal crisis.

Sometimes it was his own subconscious that had come to warn him. Sometimes he was so drawn into himself, so obstinate inside his own misery, that his subconscious would appear in the shape of dreams and hallucinations to give him the alarm call. To warn him that something was not right, that he was drowning and he was not even noticing it, that he had to do something. And fast.

It had been that way not long after Kutner's death. At first sight everything seemed to be going back to normal. Another death, another unexpected change seemed to have been overcome. Wilson was trying to help him and he, himself, was feeling if not happy at least tranquil and even confident, secure in the future, when, all of a sudden, without any warning, _she _appeared and it was then that he realized that he was going mad.


	7. Chapter 7

VII

Imagine a room, a huge octagonal room, with innumerable recesses on the walls and in those recesses bottles and more bottles of every shape, material, colour, transparency and translucency, every one with a number and a label, and every one placed in a certain specific order. The recesses go from the floor to the ceiling, a ceiling so high that its end is enveloped in shadows and not even the tallest man in the world could be able to discern its limit.

Next to this recesses and in every of the eight walls exist doors that give access to other rooms much like the room we have been describing. These rooms open to other rooms that open to other rooms that open to other rooms in an infinite succession of rooms, doors, recesses and bottles.

This was the man's brain.

The bottles are open. Smokes emerge from them and spiral through the air at will, making trajectories of many colours and densities. Some of these lines are more visible, thicker and with a more vibrant colour. Others are thinner, with pallid tones, almost invisible. These smokes are the man's memories.

The infinity of rooms are filled with these lines of smoke that cross and recross in an intricate mesh without ever touching each other. When that occurs – Flash! – an epiphany happens. The rooms seem a chaotic mess but there is order in the chaos.

People told the man frequently, not without a certain derision, that what mattered to him was the puzzle, to solve the puzzle. He, himself, used to say that many times. He said that because it was convenient to him, because that was in accord with the mask that he put up for everyone, because that reinforced the mask. But it was not completely true. Or better, it was true but not in the way the others understood it and not in the way he used to tell it. Lying with the truth was the man's favourite way of lying.

When people said "puzzle" they meant "game", when he thought "puzzle" he thought "mystery". Each illness was a puzzle because each illness was a mystery. Each patient was a puzzle because each patient was a mystery. It was the solving of the mystery that interested the man. Not only the mystery of the disease but also the mystery of the patient, even if he was the first to admit, even to himself, that that didn't interest him. And in the majority of times it didn't, in the same way as he was not interested in the millions of common illnesses that torment a human being for a few days and then they go away. Nothing that the man could diagnose in a blink of an eye was interesting to him. But the rest? Oh, he lived for the rest. Because behind the word "puzzle" was the word "mystery" and behind the word "mystery" was the word "truth". The Truth. And he believed in Truth. He believed that there was nothing in this world that couldn't be deciphered. Everything had an answer if one had commitment enough, curiosity enough, courage enough, stubbornness enough, and – why not? – madness enough to find it; to hold what was apparently obscure, mysterious, indecipherable, terrible even, precisely because it was obscure, mysterious, indecipherable, and bring it to the light for everyone to see and say: "Look, this is this, there is a reason for being this way, for behaving this way, it's not something sprung by chance, nor is it something moved by magic forces or by the will of some god. No. This thing can be explained, can be understood, _can, eventually, be controlled_." It was like this for diseases, for people, for everything. "There is always a reason".

That's why, deep down, the man didn't understand where was the problem of him wanting to solve the "puzzle". In his eyes, it was a matter of pride, not a flaw of character. After all, was it not the desire to solve the puzzle that formed the basis of the whole Western Civilization?

He was a man of science. He was a man of thought and of action. He needed to know. Against everything and everyone, in the most difficult circumstances, he persevered, he would never give up. If it happened that a patient died before the man had the chance to find the cause, it was he, himself, that performed the autopsy; if he hadn't been able to solve the mystery while the patient was still alive he would find it out in death. It was not a thing that he liked, on the contrary. He avoided at all costs reaching that stage, it was not even an option for him, the way he saw it, but, unfortunately, a non-option that happened sometimes. Because it was Life that mattered to the man, not Death. He was an agent of Life. Death was his biggest enemy, an enemy that was forever lurking.

When Kutner had died, the man had been shaken. Not so much by the death itself but more because of the circumstances in which it had happened. Suicide. That had raised a serious problem for the man. Kutner had been working for him for almost two years. The man had seen him every day during that time, he had called him an idiot one thousand times, he had played pranks on him, he had, in his own way, respected Kutner because he was _one of his own_, he was a member of _his _team, and as a member of his team, Kutner was above all the other doctors that worked in the hospital and that didn't belong to the man's team, with the exception of Wilson. And all of a sudden, without a warning, without the man noticing even the smallest change in his behaviour, Kutner, the most joyful, optimistic, and curious of all the people that worked for him, had shot himself in the head. How could that have happened? Why had Kutner done that? And, most important, how could he, Gregory House, the man who paid attention to everything, the man to whom no anomaly went unnoticed, to whom a simple delay, a spot in a jacket, a wrinkle in a shirt, a slightly crooked tie, a yawning here, a squint there, would have made sound the alarms in his mind, how could he have been caught by surprise? The man couldn't understand. It was an enigma.

An enigma that he had tried relentlessly to solve in the days following the discovery of Kutner's body, as if he was diagnosing a disease, as if Kutner could come back to life through the man's efforts to understand his death.

He had several hypotheses that went from the improbable to the bizarre. All of them ultimately useless, because the only person that could have unraveled the mystery wasn't alive anymore.

Deep in his heart, the man had felt guilty. He had felt that he had failed, that he hadn't paid enough attention, that Kutner hadn't had the same importance to him as Thirteen or Taub, for example. The man, pure and simple, hadn't had enough curiosity for Kutner. Why? He didn't know. What the man knew was that he had never spent time thinking about Kutner's dreams, desires, fears.

On the day of the funeral, when everyone had been paying their last respects to the dead man, the man had been in Kutner's apartment looking at photographs, trying, in some way, to enter into Kutner's world, trying to understand what person had his employee been. In a way, it was an autopsy of sorts what he had tried to do. An autopsy performed not on a cadaver but on a soul.

The man had spend his time looking at several pictures of Kutner: when he was a child; an adolescent; an adult; with his parents; with his friends; on his graduation day looking formal; on the beach looking happy;… and he had not recognized the person being portrayed there. That was Kutner without a doubt and, at the same time, it wasn't. It had been a strange feeling. By looking at the photos the man had wanted to grab Kutner's essence but for some reason he had not been able to do it. All that had remained had been the image of Kutner in several situations, positions and places. The images had nothing to tell. They were opaque, empty, and meaningless. Kutner didn't live there. He had gone forever, and when the man had realized that was when he had experienced, maybe for the first time in that week, a true feeling of loss.

Amber, his father, Kutner. Three deaths separated by a short space of time. Three deaths that had scarred the man indelibly, in one way or another.

In the days that had followed Kutner's funeral, there had been on the part of everyone the necessity to return to normal. Wilson started to play pranks on the man. He remembered he was playing piano when _she_ had appeared, just like that, coming from nowhere, as real as him.

If the man hadn't known for sure about the impossibility of her presence there, in his home, or in any other place for that matter, he could have been fooled. But he knew so he wasn't. Amber was there, in front of him, the same Amber that had died in a bus accident a year before, the same Amber for whom he had risked his life, the same Amber for whose death he had been feeling, secretly, guilty ever since. And there she was, smiling at him, as if she had never left, as if her death had been only temporary, an interval between one thing and another.

This had been what the man had thought as soon as he _saw_ her. As soon as he _heard_ her, however, other thoughts had appeared in his head. The woman in front of him was not Amber, she was only some thing that had borrowed Amber's body, Amber's face. And that thing was a part of him. The woman who was standing there, watching, smiling, talking, was, nothing more nothing less, than him.

This realization should have been enough to profoundly shake every normal person, but the man was not every normal person. And, in the beginning, he had understood that, yes, the apparition was indeed a problem. The fact that a part of his subconscious had decided, for unknown reasons, to appear before him, to speak to him, suggesting things, was not a situation that he could think of as "ordinary". It was without a doubt a bizarre occurrence, maybe even unsettling – he remembered thinking that at the time – but, nevertheless, it had some curious elements to it.

Reminiscing about those times now, three years in the future, the man could clearly see that what had been more disturbing than the hallucination itself had been his own belief that he could continue being a doctor with a disembodied manifestation of his subconscious participating actively in the differential diagnosis, formulating hypothesis, and him not only listening but acting in accordance to them. The fact that he had dealt with what was happening to him as if it was some sort of scientific experimentation should have been a sign that probably he was not well, that probably he needed help, serious help.

But at the time, the man hadn't thought of that. The truth was, that after a brief period of, shall we say, adaptation, he not only got used to the presence of the hallucination but he even felt pleasure in her company. It was a secret between him and himself that nobody else shared. The man had thought: "At last someone intelligent to talk to."

This state of mind had continued up to the point when "Amber" had tried to kill Chase. Or, at least, had tried to do him harm. And it was then that the man saw something in him that he knew existed but that, up until then, he had never had the guts to face it.

The man could lie to others, he could use a mask to drive everyone away, but he didn't have secrets from himself. He knew who he was, what he was. But, despite this, there were chambers in his core that he didn't like to visit, dark hidden chambers, like houses abandoned long ago but that still remained because everyone had forgotten them or because their demolition required too much trouble. Things that just stood there, carcasses of a past life. Certain chambers in the man's soul were like that. Then, the hallucination had come and had brought light into those chambers, revealing what was hidden there: rage, envy, selfishness. Sentiments that shamed him, sentiments that made him feel small, that _made him small_. And, like in a mirror, "Amber" had showed them to him. And he hadn't been able to run away.

When the man had looked inside the hallucination's eyes he had seen the black hole that existed in his heart, not a large hole, more like a dark dot in fact, almost imperceptible, but that was there, and it was dangerous.

From that moment on, the man had tried everything to make that presence, which had started to become odious to him, disappear. He had made a list of possible causes that had triggered the hallucinations. On the bottom of that list was the word "Vicodin".

He had gone through the items, systematically, logically, always with "Amber" by his side, taunting him. One by one he had crossed every possibility until "Vicodin" was the one that remained.

When he had reached that stage, the man had to stop. He hadn't been sure if he could live without Vicodin. He hadn't been sure if he could stand the pain in all its strength. He had been afraid. Very afraid. On the table were his sanity and the return to pain.

At this point his thoughts had turned to Cuddy. She was the only one who could help him with the Vicodin withdrawal, he had thought. And she had done that, in one night of vomit, nausea, tremors, pain, with "Amber" mocking him the whole time. But Cuddy had taken care of him and had not let him fail in his intent. By dawn, the hallucination had been gone, he had kissed Cuddy and one thing had led to another.

The man, in his cell, looked at the dark when he thought about that dawn. In what had happened during that dawn. In what he had felt after he had made love to the woman of whom he had been thinking persistently for some time. The man sighed and put his hand over his leg again. The other hand remained still, over his belly.

The day after the withdrawal had brought with it some kind of euphoria. The man, in a single night, had defeated "Amber", had got ridden of the Vicodin and had conquered the woman of his heart. It seemed almost too good to be true.

He had arrived at the hospital feeling a victor, more than a victor, he had felt unbeatable, a giant, capable of doing anything. This feeling had lasted throughout the morning. When afternoon arrived things had developed in some surreal way. Cuddy, who had already screamed at him earlier and that he, of course, had not taken seriously, had started acting strangely and the man just couldn't figure out the reason, no matter how hard he thought about it. Was she afraid? Was she regretting what she had done? He had felt that there was something happening that he couldn't seem to grasp. "Women", he had concluded with a shrug of his shoulders, "they need always an incentive to move forward." Then he had decided to give that incentive. _And what incentive it had been_.

He had screamed from the balcony, for the whole hospital to hear, that he, Gregory House, "had slept with Lisa Cuddy". Just like that. _What a Homeric moment._

The man frowned at this commentary from his inner voice. The memories of that moment were not pleasant. But they were old and many things had happened since then. The time that had passed had made them lost a bit of their bite. Time heals everything. Was there any bit of truth in this platitude? _Of course. Can't you see it?_

But if that "Homeric" moment was present in his memory in a somewhat dim way, what had happened next still gave him cold sweats, because what had happened next had been the horror.


	8. Chapter 8

VIII

The man had wanted Cuddy to save him from himself. That had been the reason he went looking for her.

During that year, the two of them had somehow gotten closer. Through pain and sorrow they had made a connection. They had re-established a link that had been broken for years. He had felt her pain when her first attempt at adopting a child had failed.

He had looked into her eyes and had seen the suffering, the frustration, the loss, and he had understood what she was feeling. He had understood very well. It was what he had been feeling since the infarction. To desire one thing with all one's heart, to have that thing almost within hand's reach, to be able to feel it, to be able to think of it as one's own and then … pfff… reality would come and snatch the thing away, putting an end to all hopes. The man knew what that was. It could be said that that was a knowledge born from experience. And it had been that crushed hope that he had seen on Cuddy's face. And it had been that which had attracted him because the suffering of others had always been an attraction to him.

Here it was someone who was going through what he had gone through so, so many times. Here was someone that, in a way, was a kindred spirit. And never had Cuddy looked more beautiful than in that moment.

And he had dived in that beauty without thinking, almost in an impulse. He had dived in that pain and he had kissed her. A tender and delicate and intense kiss. A kiss made of a mixture of two pains, two sorrows, two desires. Two souls. The man had stopped feeling alone.

The kiss lasted but a brief moment. Like everything that is perfect.

In the darkness of his cell, he could still feel the taste of that kiss. He could relive it any time he wanted, because it was imprinted in his memory with the same force as when it had happened for the first time, as if he was kissing her still, and not only _remembering _that he was kissing her. As if he and Cuddy were, even now, embraced and lost in that kiss. And maybe they were. If time did not advance in a straight line, if time, instead, was made of instants that repeated themselves over and over again, for all eternity, then he was in that cell and at the same time he was in Cuddy's arms, kissing her. And what had lasted a breath was, in reality, eternal.

This thought brought some comfort to the man. Not even he could say why.

The kiss was almost a nothing that had ended before it had truly begun. It had ended as soon as the man realized what he was doing. He had felt surprised with himself, with the feelings he had discovered in his heart, with the love that was there, hidden in a corner. The man had sensed all this and had been scared. And he had run away. And he had kept running until that cursed night when he had asked Cuddy for help.

That action had led to the balcony scene, and the balcony scene had led to the discovery that everything that had happened before – the night of detoxing, the morning of love – had been a lie. It had been a hallucination, a fantasy, a hallucination disguised as a fantasy, a fantasy disguised as a hallucination. Things inside of things inside of things, until he couldn't make sense of anything anymore. In the moment he had made this discovery something horrible crossed his mind. What if nothing was as it seemed? What if there was no reality? What if all that existed, all that surrounded him, was a dream? What if he, himself, was a dream? He had felt a sense of panic settling in. A panic like the man had never felt before. Where was the truth? Was there such a thing? Or was that too an illusion? Could it be that all his deep beliefs, all that made the basis of his being, all that he had taken for granted, were nothing? He didn't know. _He _didn't know.

The man had felt that he was losing his mind little by little. He had sensed reason leaving him like water slipping through a funnel. How long had he been in Cuddy's office staring at an empty space? Minutes? Hours? Days? Years? He had lost sense of the time.

Everything was watery, without fixed form – Cuddy, the table, the paintings, the walls, the floor. He had this feeling that if he tried to touch one of these things they would dissolve between his fingers. It was as if he was at the bottom of the sea looking up at the surface.

Through one corner of his eyes he had seen "Amber" – she was back, perhaps she had never had left in the first place – and another hallucination: Kutner. They were telling him what a fool he had been, what a fool he was.

At a given time, the man couldn't say when exactly, Cuddy had touched his face and had said something to him. He had felt the touch of her hand on his face. His ears had carried to the brain the sound of her voice but only the sound, not the words. He was feeling and hearing but as if he was someone else. It was as if he was in that room and at the same time he wasn't. There was a disconnection between the body and the mind, a lack of alignment. He remembered that he fought to re-establish the balance, to realign body and mind, to be himself again. And when he was trying to do that a doubt had appeared. What if he couldn't? What if he was to remain in that state, torn apart, body to one side, mind to the other, forever? All of him was shaking and sweating. He couldn't take his eyes off the hallucinations. He could hear "Amber" laughing.

At last, he had understood what Cuddy was trying to tell him. She was asking: "Are you alright?" He remembered answering: "No, I'm not alright."

Of what had happened next, the man had a faint memory. Even now the precise order of the events eluded him. He could only remember going through them like a sleepwalker. He could hear but not really. He could talk but his words would come out mechanical, automatic, without any thought or feeling behind them.

The thing that he remembered with some clarity was being seated next to Wilson, in a car, watching, through the window, the branches of the trees passing by, and the sun glittering between the leafs. Wilson was taking him to Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital.

To say that the man felt fear during that long long trip is falling short of the truth. The man was beyond fear, he was living in a region without time or space or anything. He could only think about the pain that was waiting for him at the end.

At last they had arrived at Mayfield.

The man had come out of the car in silence (he hadn't said a word during the whole trip). Wilson had removed a suitcase from the trunk and had given it to him. The man had taken the suitcase, had turned his back to Wilson and had limped towards the door of the asylum where a nurse was already there, waiting for him.

When the man had reached the door, he had turned and looked at Wilson, who was still standing there, near the car. He had looked for a long time as if this was the last time he would see his friend again. His best friend. His only friend. Then, he had entered the building wondering if he would ever come out again.


	9. Chapter 9

IX

"Mayfield", the man thought. And immediately the old, solid building appeared in his mind. How long has it been since he last thought of Mayfield? How much suffering, past and present, had those walls, corridors, and rooms seen? How much pain? How much loneliness? His, to begin with.

It had been in Mayfield that the man had been through – how should one call it? – a detoxing procedure. Yes, "a detoxing procedure", and at the end of that painful process no more Vicodin remained in the man's body. He was clean. _As good as new… so to speak_. The Vicodin had been gone, unfortunately the same could not be said of the pain. That one had remained and he would have to learn how to deal with it, how to endure it, without the help of opiates.

And the man had been willing to do that. Although he had never found out the cause of the hallucinations, he had hypothesized that they were somehow connected with Vicodin abuse. _Were they really? _He had thought so, at the time. Not that the man had thought much about the subject, even during his first days at Mayfield. The hallucinations were gone, that was the most important. There were certain things that should be better left alone.

Dr Nolan, the psychiatrist that had been in charge of the man's case, had not agreed though.

As soon as he had been cleaned of the meds, the man thought that he was ready to leave Mayfield. Dr Nolan had felt differently. After a battle of wills that had almost cost a person's life – _not one of your best moments_ – the man had finally agreed with Nolan. That yes, he needed help, that he was tired of suffering alone, tired of being miserable, that he wanted to change, to get out of the hole he had dug for himself. The man had wanted to be happy. "Be happy". Like everybody else. "Like everybody else". The man could only laugh now at these words. He could only laugh at his own naiveté. _At your own stupidity_.

He had said to Nolan: "I want to get better. I want to be happy." And that had been the desire that had kept him at Mayfield, in the end.

At first sight one would think that putting the man inside an institution with a strict control system as Mayfield had would eventually lead to one of two possible outcomes: the end of the institution or the end of the man. But with the resolution of wanting to be happy guiding his will, the man had forced himself to accept and to adapt to the routine.

It had not been easy. Routines bored him. He always had fought against them. He was always looking for ways to undermine them, to find a crack in their walls and to bring them down. He would imagine pranks, games, tricks to keep him entertained. Routines meant authority but also meant tedium. And he abhorred tedium. To exist was an enormous boredom, sometimes. _It's always better than to not exist_. The man had to agree.

But in Mayfield he had been resolute in his purpose. And he had followed the rules.

After the infarction he had started to build a protective armour and he knew the time had come for him to tear that armour down piece by piece. What in the beginning had been a means to help him survive had become, with time, a prison that was shutting him from life.

To trust others, that was the secret. It was only a matter of perspective. The change should start here. Instead of looking inside, to look outside and to see the enormous richness that was the world, to see the diversity of the human soul. The man just needed to cast a look at his fellows inmates in Mayfield, each unique in their own way, each a grain of sand on an endless beach. And from the inmates to the nurses and the doctors. And from them, to everyone else that lived outside Mayfield's walls. To look at humankind and to admire it. A whole world to explore. And he belonged to that world. And he wanted to belong to that world.

The man remembered that someone had said to him once that total trust changed a person. At the time he had been a bit perplexed, stunned even, when he heard that. He had felt that those words touched some deficiency that existed deep in his soul. He didn't trust anyone. But he was willing to try. He was willing to try anything. At Mayfield, for the first time, he was going to try something radical, for him. He was going to try a change from the inside instead from the outside. He trusted Nolan. He wanted to trust Nolan.

It had been in Mayfield that the man had met Lydia. At first he was surprised, he couldn't understand her. Lydia seemed to like him. She seemed not to mind his somewhat rude manners. He had thought that strange. Nobody liked him. He was ready for that. More, he was expecting that. The man had surmised that one needed to be masochistic, or very patient, or both, to like him. _Or be Wilson_. But Lydia seemed to see in him something more than himself. Something that even he didn't know existed. That was strange. That was peculiar. Why would someone intelligent, or seemingly intelligent, be interested in a stranger that was a patient in an insane asylum? He could be completely bonkers, a nut case, for all she knew about him. Could there be a problem with her? Lydia had puzzled him. It had been also a puzzle to him the fact that she apparently never had missed a visit to her catatonic sister-in-law that was also her best friend. She had been visiting her everyday, for years, not wavering before the fact that her friend, in all that time, had never showed signs that she sensed Lydia's presence. Lydia's loyalty had been at odds with the man's understanding of human nature. In his way of thinking, that loyalty should never even exist. Why this clinging to a ruin? Lydia had been a mystery to him.

The man remembered a certain night when he and Lydia were outside talking. He remembered that he couldn't take his eyes off her hair. It had been the lights. The lights were shining and dancing on Lydia's hair creating various tones of red. He had looked fascinated at the shifting of colours that went from yellowish orange to the darkest of reds. He had wished he could slip his fingers through her hair. He imagined that it must feel as smooth as silk. Phosphorescent silk. It was a hair made of light. He was mesmerized by its beauty. And then the kiss came. A gentle kiss. An unexpected kiss. And the man had been afraid. And he did what he had done with Cuddy. He ran.

But Lydia had told him – he still remembered the sound of her voice – Lydia had told him something about beginnings and ends. That the end might suck but that doesn't mean the beginning should too. The man had pondered over those words. If he wanted to change, really change, he needed to take a risk. That to him was clear. He had to take chances. Was he willing to do that? Had he the courage to trust another person and run the risk of getting disappointed, of getting hurt? And had he any other choice? He had thought of every path that opened before him, of every line of action, like a strategist preparing an attack or planning a defence. When the man had rejected Lydia, he had hurt her. And he hadn't wanted to do that. He hadn't wanted to hurt anyone, least alone her. While he was thinking all this, the man had concluded that everything that was worthwhile always carried a risk in itself. And his happiness was definitely something that was worthwhile. So he had taken a deep breath and had welcomed a happy beginning and had tried not to think about how the end will be. He just needed to go with the flow. He just needed to grab the moment, without minding nothing but the here and now.

The here and now of dancing with Lydia, in the darkness of an empty room, to the sound of a music that was playing only in their heads. Embraced. United. Together. Him feeling the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin.

While he was dancing with Lydia the man had felt happy and sad at the same time, because the music that he was hearing was sad too. Sad and beautiful, like everything that contains in itself its own ending. The music would eventually cease. They would stop dancing. Everything was brief. But that brevity was not synonymous of less intensity. What was the difference between a love that endured years and one that lasted an instant? Both were true. His love for Lydia was true. Is the life of a butterfly worth less than that of a man? Not to the butterfly. And what about a flower? A leaf on a tree? A wave? A passing cloud? Were all these things less beautiful less true, because they lasted so little time? What was time after all? What difference did it make? He had loved Lydia when he was dancing with her. He had loved Lydia when he was inside her. He loved Lydia still. The brevity only had made the love between them more beautiful, like a precious thing, like grabbing a light. That's what happiness was. An elusive thing. One had to be attentive to grab it and one had to be prepared to lose it.

The man had cried when he made love to Lydia. Every pain that he was feeling, every loneliness, every sadness, that was inside of him had come up and he hadn't been able to control himself. For a long long time he had been pain and suffering and he had been yearning for someone else's touch. And that someone was there, next to him. Touching him, kissing him. And that someone liked him. Even perhaps loved him. And he had been feeling so alone and now he wasn't anymore.

And Lydia had enveloped him and they had remained together, in silence, listening to each other's breathing. And the future had stopped worrying him.

How did the man feel now while he remembered those times? Stuck in a dark cell, what were his feelings? It was only memories, nothing more. Pieces of memories tied to one another like a never-ending string. What he had more now was memories. And time to think about them.

Lydia had been wise. The beginning had been very good. The ending…

When the end had finally come, the man was caught by surprise. He knew that his time with Lydia was destined to be a short one but he was happy and he didn't want for that happiness to have an end. When he knew that Lydia was moving with her now non-catatonic sister-in-law, which the man had cured, by the way… oh, sweet irony – _another one_… he had went to her house. He had wanted an explanation. He wasn't ready to let go.

The man had seen Lydia's son, and had heard what she had to say. And he had understood. But that understanding hadn't brought him any relief. He had felt lost, without a course. Like a man at sea, but a man that refused to drown. The man was still determined to be happy. That resolution had not abandoned him. His mind was set in not returning to be the man he once was. A rebirth, that's what he had the intention of doing. Nothing short of a rebirth.

He was free from the Vicodin, the time had come for him to be free of all the baggage that was pushing him down, that was preventing him from living. And he wanted to live. He didn't want to be dead in life. He was ready for the world outside. The time had come for him to leave Mayfield and to start all over again.


	10. Chapter 10

X

"Hope is for sissies." The man had believed in this. He still did. But when he had left Mayfield, ready to continue his inner change and to reach happiness, the man had understood that one dose of hope was needed. After all, happiness would not come suddenly. He knew that and he was ready for it. He had to make an effort if he wanted to succeed and it would take time. And meanwhile he needed to believe that he would reach his goal. Hope was the base of everything he had wanted to build: a new life, a better life.

The first thing the man had done after Mayfield was to seek out Cuddy. He had wanted to continue what had been interrupted one year before. He was in love with Cuddy and now he thought that he had something to offer her, something more than the hurt and inaccessible man he once had been. But things had changed while the man had been in Mayfield. Cuddy now was with another. When the man had found out he had felt hurt, deeply. But, even so, the will to change remained in his heart. This little set back with Cuddy hadn't seemed enough to shake that will.

Another change had happened that year. The man started to live with Wilson, in an apartment that his friend had bought for them.

It had been strange to return to the same places, after being in Mayfield. To return to the hospital, to see his team again, to practice medicine again. He had been away for almost a year, locked in a remote place, living with the same people day and night, following the same routines. Now he was back to familiar surroundings. However, there was something different about them. And that difference was more in him than in the places. The man had felt it.

He had tried to follow Nolan's advice. He had tried to be more attentive to others, not only for curiosity's sake like before, but with a genuine care. Or so the man had thought.

One day the hospital had been in lockdown due to an incident of some sort, and the man had found himself stuck in a room with a patient. A patient that had tried, in the past, to present his case to him but whose file the man had ignored. And now the patient was dying.

Looking at the patient, the man had seen himself in him. He had seen how his own last hours would be and a rage had grown inside of him. A rage against the patient but above all else a rage against himself. He could even end his days alone, but never in that way, cowardly, pathetically agonizing on an hospital bed, in the dark, forgotten by everyone. That was not in his plans. That would not do. He was Gregory House. He would not let that happen to him.

But with the passing of time and the more he listened to the patient's story, the rage started to give way to a sort of empathy towards the sick man. Here they were, two complete strangers talking about daughters, lost loves, regrets, changes, life and death. Through their conversation the man had seen the humanity that was in that patient and he had understood the solemnity of that moment. A man was dying, a life was ending. He was witnessing this man's last hours, he was listening to his last words. The mistakes the patient had made in his life didn't matter; the hearts he had broken, the disappointments he had caused. Something bigger than both men was present in that room, the man had sensed it even if he couldn't say in words what that something was. At this realization a sadness had come upon him as always was the case whenever he had come across the brevity and frailty of human life.

That night, in that hospital, in that room, there had been a bond uniting patient and doctor. One was the future of the other. The patient was dying. Soon his existence would only be a memory or less than a memory. The same thing would happen, one day, to the doctor. There was a mystery in all of this, a mystery to which there could never be an answer. There were things in this world beyond human understanding, unfathomable things, things that dealt with matters of life and death, things that couldn't be put into words, things that could only be felt. There was a truth in the whole situation. The only thing the man could do was to be there, keeping that stranger company. A stranger who was not that much of a stranger, after all. He was more a companion, a fellow traveller, on the long voyage that we call life.

And when the right moment came, the man had upped the patient's morphine dose and had remained with him, in silence, until the end.

* * *

The man would like to have said that this experience and others he had lived during the course of that year had given him another view of human nature, a view less cynic, more compassionate than the one he had always had. He would like to have said that what he had learnt in Mayfield still applied. That he had learnt to admire the diversity of human life and that the others interested him immensely. But neither of that would have been true.

The truth was that if there was any diversity in this world that diversity seemed to stem only from stupidity. He would look at the others and he could only see idiots. A pretty woman would walk towards him in a bar arousing his interest, but then she would make the fatal mistake… she would start talking.

Banality and imbecility bored him to death, and they seemed to be everywhere he looked. The world was a mountain of idiots apparently created with the sole purpose of smothering him. _Death by stupidity. Nice image._

Impatience had started to grow in the heart of the man. An impatience born from the fact that what seemed to be changing was other people's lives, not his. Wilson had rekindled his relationship with his first wife, and they had starting living together. The man had returned to his old apartment. Things between Cuddy and Lucas seemed to be getting serious and further developments were to be expected.

Everything around him was changing for the better, or simply changing. Everything but him. He was not one jot happier than when he had left Mayfield. Worse; every small change that had happened in the man's life during that year was, little by little, reverting to its original state, as if these changes were loose puzzle pieces that someone had returned to their proper places. As if the life that he had led before Mayfield was necessarily the life that he was condemned to live until the end of his days. As if he needed to fulfil a certain role in the grand scheme of things and any deviation from that role could, temporarily, be accepted but would be doomed from the start and in the end everything would go back to the way it was. He had found out that it was not that easy to get out of the hole after all. _What a beautiful trap you made for yourself. It is quite remarkable._

After Mayfield he had tried to stay away from the hospital but his own recklessness had brought him back to PPTH. Soon he had regained his medical license, and then, his position as head of the Diagnostics Department. The man had left his home to live with Wilson just to return in the end to the familiar 221 B. Everything as before.

He had found out that in order to be happy an inner decision and a change in behaviour wasn't enough. It was also necessary for some substantial change to occur in the reality around him.

But that hadn't happened and the edifice that the man had erected, made of hope and resolution, was running the risk of crumbling. By the end of the year, there were already some cracks in the walls and its foundations were shaky.

The pain in his leg had started to bother him again, it became almost unbearable; he was drinking more and frustration was growing inside of him. Despite his efforts in trying to believe otherwise everything seemed to him without meaning. He had begun to doubt if that strange and elusive thing called happiness was ever meant for him.

The man had stopped believing in Nolan and he was questioning if he had not been deluded all along, if what he was hoping to achieve was nothing more than an illusion, a lie. If, in a world filled with idiots, he wasn't the biggest idiot of them all.

He had lost the woman he loved (or was running the risk of losing her) and that loss, which, at the beginning, he had come to accept with a certain resignation, had revealed itself to be the rift that was threatening to tumble all his desires, all his hopes. Mayfield was very far away.

Then something had happened. Something that had changed everything. Even now, despite of what would come to pass, the man could not help but think about that moment as some kind of a miracle. A luminous moment that had happened to him.

It had been during a crisis. _Another one_. The man had lost a patient, Hannah – he still remembered her name, a rare thing –, in tragic circumstances. The way Hannah died had been another proof to him of the randomness of life.

He remembered being seated on his bathroom floor, with some Vicodin lying in the palm of his open hand. He was looking at the pills. He had been staring at them for the longest of times, debating whether he should take them or not. Since detoxing at Mayfield he never again had taken Vicodin. If he took one now that would mean defeat, it would be admitting to himself that his purpose after Mayfield had turned into nothing. He had failed. He had felt he had failed with Hannah too, even if her death had not been his fault. He had tried to save her but it hadn't been possible. Life had no meaning. He used to believe in that before Mayfield but afterwards he had harboured the possibility of that belief not being true. _Not the possibility, the illusion_. He had thought that perhaps there was a meaning. It was only a question of finding it and to know where to look for it. And he had tried and he hadn't found any and now… now… The reason behind the change had stayed way back there, completely forgotten, and the change itself… why had he wanted to change again? And for whom? He had lost everything: Hannah… Cuddy… He only had himself.

The man had looked hard at the palm of his hand, at the pills that lay there. What did it matter if he took them or not? Was there any reason not to? The man couldn't find one. The pain was reaching its highest peak. The pain in his leg and the pain in his soul.

He had been immersed in thought when he sensed a presence. He had looked up and there was Cuddy.

He was stunned. Cuddy was the last person he was expecting to see. That day they had had a terrible fight. They had said hurtful things to each other. What he had heard from her still resounded in his heart. Words that had hurt him deeply but that, at the same time, had made him think and had given him an opportunity to show Cuddy that he was more than what she thought he was. And the man had seized that opportunity. He had showed her that he was a man, not a jerk, not a thing, not a son of a bitch without feelings. No. A man. A man who had suffered and had been changed by life. A man who knew what he had lost with that change, who knew what he had become. A man. A man deserving of respect. A man who had had the strength of character to lay down all masks, the strength of heart to reveal to Cuddy the core of his being, all his fears, all his weaknesses. Under the wreckage from the accident he had presented his bare soul to her because he had wanted her to _know_. He had wanted her to know what she was losing. A man.

After that confession his attention had been fully directed towards helping Hannah and he had left the rest for another time. Cuddy and Lucas were getting married, it didn't matter anymore what the man had to say or do. It was too late. He had been too late.

And afterwards Hannah had died in the ambulance and from there nothing else was important.

And now Cuddy was in his bathroom, looking at him. The man couldn't understand the reason why she had come. And then she said: "I love you. I wish I didn't but I can't help it."

And then she had helped him stand up and he had kissed her and hope had been rekindled in the man's heart.


	11. Chapter 11

XI

They were together. He and Cuddy. Hannah's memory still persisted in fragments in the man's mind when they kissed but that memory had started to slowly fade away when Cuddy removed his jacket, his T-shirt and cleaned up his neck wound.

After that, Cuddy had unbuttoned his trousers and had pulled them down. And then she had kissed his scar.

A wave of gratitude washed over the man in that moment. A wave that cleaned away all suffering, sadness, pain, loneliness. He felt his heart full to the brim. He felt reborn again. He felt as a child in the beginning of the world. Everything was beautiful and painful at the same time. Electric shockwaves ran throughout his body. The man was pure electricity. He felt alive, truly alive. His soul was singing. He was joy and love. And at the same time, perplexity. The man still could not believe that the woman he loved was there, with him; that this time it was not a hallucination.

Cuddy was there, he could feel her, he could feel her kisses. It was amazing, it was… he didn't know if he deserved such happiness but that was not the time to speculate about the issue. No thinking, only feeling was allowed.

After Cuddy kissed his scar, he lifted her in his arms, gently, like someone picking up something precious and fragile, and carried her to his bed. There was no rush. They had all the time in the world. Time had stopped just for them. Nothing beyond that room existed. Everything he ever wanted was in there. The rest did not matter. His bedroom was a point of light in the dark, a solitary ship sailing in the interstellar space. He and Cuddy. Cuddy and he. Cuddy inside of him and him inside of Cuddy. Two in one. One being, one body, one heart, one soul, one spirit. He felt complete. She was mending him, piece by piece. She was curing him. He felt like a man again. A man. A giant. An immensity. All. He was all. His heart was exploding in thousand little fragments of light. And he was each one of those fragments. He was pure light. He was _the _light. He felt melting, liquefying. He was water. He was light and water and fire and ice and all. He was all. _They _were all. All. Forever.

The man had looked at Cuddy and smiled. The blue of his eyes was bright and intense. It was a saturated blue where joy danced. The man had looked at Cuddy wishing to absorb everything: the softness of her hair; the texture of her skin; the curves of her body; the light of her eyes; her smile. Her smile.

Cuddy's body was a landscape that we wanted to explore, a landscape where he wished to lose himself, a landscape that he desired to know thoroughly just to be able to forget and start the whole process again and again. He would never get tired of her body.

He had arrived there. At that happiness that he had searched for so long. It was like reaching the summit of a mountain that had taken ages to climb. He was now on the summit and he was looking around. The sun was bathing everything. All was white, luminous, phosphorescent, beautiful. There was no pain, only peace. His inner child was smiling with an open smile and a song came to his mind.

In the next morning, when he awoke, the man couldn't help feeling surprised by Cuddy still being there, lying by his side. The sunlight, filtered by the curtains, bathed the room in a soft light. The man looked at Cuddy sleeping. Sweetness and love were shining in his eyes, and something else. Could it be sadness? A doubt had appeared in his heart. What if what he was living with Cuddy couldn't stand reality? What if she came to regret her decision? What if he couldn't change? But he could change, couldn't he? He had decided to change before. It was not too late. Maybe he could still do it. The man wished to touch Cuddy, to feel her presence, but he didn't want to wake her. So he stood watching her, in the morning silence, thinking about everything that had happened and trying to foresee what the future would bring.

They spent that day together: talking, playing games (he tried to open a bottle of champagne with his father's sword), making love (several times), enjoying each other company. Only Wilson had come to interrupt for brief moments the little world they had built just for themselves.

It was a fragile world, the man had felt it. A world made of crystal that ran the risk of shattering at any moment. A brittle world.

The enthusiasm of the morning and the afternoon had given way, at night, to a certain apprehension. The man had sensed that what he had with Cuddy was not going to have a future. He told her so himself, when she was preparing to leave. He told her that he hadn't changed and that he probably would never change; that she was going to regret being with him; that he was going to end up hurting her. His words had come from the bottom of his heart, fuelled by his fears. He was afraid of the future.

Cuddy had listened to the man, and at the end, when he had stopped talking, she had looked well into his eyes and, with determination in her voice, she had said that she didn't want him to change, that he was the best man she would ever know and that he would always be the best man she would ever know.

"I love you", had been the man's answer.

_I love you_.

The man repeated the words for the dark to listen.

"I".

"Love".

"You".

The sound of the words vanished in the air, swallowed by the silence of the cell.

The man had never trusted words. He always believed that words meant nothing. Only actions mattered. Words were a lie. Language was a lie. _Actions can be lies too. _But actions were facts, were tangible, had substance. Words were just empty air. Said in a second, forgotten in the next. From the moment something was said, from the moment in which a sentiment was transformed into language, the purity of that sentiment somehow got diminished. This is what the man believed. _But the human being is made of language_. Therein lay the problem.

It was not that the man had lied when he had said to Cuddy that he loved her. He had been completely honest. He loved Cuddy. But his "I love you" was just a shadow of the sentiment that he harboured in his heart. As faithful to it as a photocopy is faithful to the original. The words fell short to express everything he felt for Cuddy.

Remembering that moment, with the knowledge of what came next, the man couldn't help but think that probably he shouldn't have said what he had said. His love should have been proven only by actions, shouldn't have needed the reassurance of words. Cuddy should just have known without the need for him to say anything. The same could be said about her words. She shouldn't have said them. The man didn't doubt that she had believed, at the time, that what she was saying was the truth. She had believed. But believing that one thing is true does not make it necessarily so. And that had been the case. And he shouldn't have believed in Cuddy's words. But he did. He did with all his might.

The man sighed. Love was a dangerous thing. The hand that was stationed on his leg started the familiar up-and-down movement again, almost without the man's notice. The dark seemed to encircle him more, almost like a solid thing. The man yearned for light.


	12. Chapter 12

XII

What do we call a fantasy that becomes reality?

The man was happy. For the first time in a long while. He was filled with an almost childish joy. He wanted to play pranks, to tell jokes, to mock his team. In short, everything he used to do in the past but now with a new joviality behind his actions, a new taste for life. While in the past his restlessness was born from his impatience with the mediocrity of everyday life and his own misery, now, on the other hand, it came from a sense of true joy, of a inner happiness.

The man felt like a child and the beginning of his relationship with Cuddy was a time of discovery and enthusiasm. The man was not alone anymore, now there was Cuddy… and Rachel, the child Cuddy had adopted three years before.

The man didn't like children. There was something unpredictable in a child that you didn't find in an adult. Children bored him and at the same time he was suspicious of them, of their honesty and their curiosity. Why in hell they always ask him, when they looked at his leg, whatever had happened to him? And they were always demanding attention and getting into trouble, and they were selfish, and they were never quiet, and they never ever did what they were told to do… Unlike the majority of adults, the man never made the mistake of treating a child with indulgence, maybe because he himself was one also. Maybe that was the reason why children were fond of him. Rachel had liked him. And he, with some reluctance at the beginning, had ended up liking her too. After all, she was not any child, she was Cuddy's child, and, one day, she could be, eventually, if things went as expected, maybe be his own kid too. Furthermore, Rachel knew how to lie. More, she knew how to lie under pressure, which, the man had to admit, was no small feat for a three year old kid. From the moment he had discovered that fact he felt the kid had potential. To be his daughter? _Daughter_. There was something that he hadn't thought about before. It was strange. Him being a father. But the possibility existed. It was there, in his reach. A possibility that he never had the chance to fully explore or think about in a serious manner.

As time went by, things between the man and Cuddy were becoming difficult. Imperceptible in the beginning, but later difficulties were occurring with greater frequency, disagreements, disappointments, recriminations, demands. Sand was entering into the machinery and what seemed to be working just fine all of a sudden stopped because of trifles, of small nothings, it seemed to him. But they were not small to her. He did all he could to smooth some corners of his personality. He had said to her that he was willing to take a leap of faith. _He _actually used the word "faith". But it seemed that nothing was enough. When the man thought that he had at last crossed that invisible line that marked the moment when they were finally able to be at ease with each other, when she would accept his idiosyncrasies, his faults, his deficiencies, he would discovered that the line had only moved a bit further away and that he had, once again, to try to reach it. That line kept shifting away from him.

The man had told Cuddy that he loved her, he had told her that if he had to choose between being a great doctor and living without her or being a lousy doctor and staying with her, she would be his choice, always. With this declaration the man dropped everything that he held most dear, his gift as a doctor, everything that made him special in his own eyes, everything that he was. He was willing to relinquish everything that he once had been, everything that he was, for her. This is what she meant to him.

The man knew only how to live in two ways: either he gave it all or he didn't give anything. In relation to Cuddy, he had chosen to give it all and all is what he was willing to give. Here it was, his "act of faith", his point of no return, his strongest proclamation of his love, made on a rainy night.

But then the unhappy day came, that most unhappy of days. Then came the moment when everything shattered. The moment when she had told him... _we know what she said. We have her words written in fire in our heart_. And everything ended.

He had tried to explain the reason why he had taken the Vicodin pill, it didn't matter. She had answered with "pain happens when we care". What did she know about pain anyway? He had promised that he could do better; that he was able to do better, his words fell on deaf ears. She had said that no, he couldn't because he never was going to change, he was selfish and he would always be selfish. And then she left. And then he stood there looking at his empty doorway.

He saw himself sitting on his bathroom floor with a Vicodin pill in his hand. In the exact same position he had been months before, on the night Hannah died, when Cuddy appeared to help him choose and to bring light into his heart. She had saved him then and now she had destroyed him. It seemed fitting, somehow. Who else had the power? Only she could be both his saviour and his killer.

To say that the man's heart was broken would not have been correct. The man's heart was Hiroshima after the bomb. A no-man's land of ashes and dust, where nothing grew and nothing could grow ever again. A desert. A grey desert with no sun.

The poet says that a man dies a thousand times. This was the man's second death. He had put all his hopes, all his desire, all his resolution since he left Mayfield in Cuddy's hands. He had built a castle made of love and hope, with Cuddy at its foundation. He had showed her the most sacred part of his soul, she had rewarded him by shoving him into a hole and covering it with dirt up to the brim. A deep deep hole. To make sure he would never rise again.

When the man looked around him, at the walls of his bathroom, at the empty corridor, at the Vicodin in the palm of his hand, an indescribable pain filled his soul. It seemed to him that he had entered a time machine and had returned to the past. It seemed to him that nothing had happened between the night Hannah died and now. It was the same night. But nobody would come this time. He knew that nobody would come this time. He knew that he was alone. Completely alone.

He looked at the pill. To take or not to take? But was there really a choice? It had been a choice before, but now? If he didn't take the pill could he be able to endure life with a pain in his leg and an emptiness in his soul? And why did he need to subject himself to that? For her? To show her that she was wrong? That he was a better man than she thought he was? To say to her: "Hey, look, see what you lost. I can quit the meds whenever I want. You mattered so much or so little to me that our break up was a setback, yes, a certain sadness, perhaps, but, hey, life goes on, right? We see each other around and good luck." Not even he could lie that much. And, besides, it seemed obscene to pretend that he was not deadly wounded, obscene to him and to her also.

In order to not lose her he had taken the Vicodin. In order to be able to be with her, to be there for her in a difficult time, and withstand at the same time the pain, the prospect that she might die, he had taken a goddamn pill. And irony of all ironies, he had lost her all the same, with accusations of being afraid to suffer, of not caring enough, of not being able to bestow the attention she deserved, of not being beside her one hundred per cent, of not doing anything and everything he could, of not giving his all and more than his all, on top of everything else. It didn't matter now. She had stripped him of all his dreams of happiness, of all his hopes of a different life, of all his resolutions of change. What did it matter what she thought of him now, what did he care about showing her that he was superior?

But, what if he took the Vicodin pill? In that case at least, he would feel less pain in his leg. It was when the man was thinking this that he heard a warning coming from his inner voice: _What about the hallucinations? What if the hallucinations come back?_ Oh, by God, let them come, let them all come. His father, Amber, Kutner, all the people he had failed, all the people he had deceived and manipulated, all the people he had hurt, all the people who had hurt him too, all the patients he hadn't been able to save and all the patients he had saved; his old team, his new team, the team that he would have in the future. Let them all come. He would welcome all with open arms. Tritter who wanted to put him in jail, Vogler who wanted to fired him, the other who had shot him, all the sons of a bitch that he had met in his life, all the idiots he had endured. All the living and all the dead. All! With the exception of one person. He invited all the manifestations of his psyche, all the multitude that lived inside of him to a great banquet of Vicodin and whisky. And that would be a night to remember.

He took the Vicodin. With an empty soul he put it in his mouth and swallowed it.

That night, the man had a dream. He dreamt that he was floating above the world. A being without substance, neither living nor dead. His body was stretched to the limit, as if it was made of rubber. So stretched it was almost transparent. He could see through it. He was a shadow, a ghost, a being on the verge of dissolution. He felt the vast emptiness of the sidereal space running through him. He was that emptiness himself. He had no existence, no past, present or future. He had no identity, no personality, no memories. He felt a terrible anguish, as if he was nothing or didn't belong to any place. He was floating through space but he didn't belong there. He saw the stars, the planets, but he was something apart, something from another plane of existence, a plane where nobody lived but him. He had no weight, no thickness, he was a two-dimensional being that for some reason had gotten lost and had drifted into this world. He walked through streets, through buildings, he looked into people's faces, but no one saw him, no one knew he was there, no one had any recollection that one day a person called Gregory House had existed.

He woke from the dream, sweating and still feeling the sensation of being incorporeal. He had looked at his hands to assure himself of their solidity, he had touched his arms to make sure he was real, that he was made of flesh and bone. Only the pain in his leg reminded him that he was alive, that he belonged, at least for now, to the world of the living. But not even that proof (nor the Vicodin he took afterwards) had assuaged the anguish and the loneliness the man was feeling in his heart. He couldn't seem to shake off the sensation that he was hollow. He had to do something.

The man limped to his living room and sat at the piano and started playing no matter what. He didn't search for any particular music, no song came to his mind, no improvisation. He just wanted to feel his fingers touching the keys and listen to the response of the piano. There was no melody in what he was playing. It was only sounds, without tone or meaning. Pure noise. Even music she had stolen from him.

He kept playing for a very long time; time enough for the anguish to pass. The morning arrived. The light of dawn, coming from the window, spilled into the room. The man stopped playing and thought. He thought that he had to move, he couldn't be standing still. Standing still meant death, he had to move, to do no matter what but just move, forward, backward, in any direction, the important thing was to move and keep moving. He had to get rid of her memory at all costs. He had to throw her away like someone discards an old jacket.

After he made this decision, he dressed in a hurry, picked the Vicodin bottle, his wallet and keys, closed the piano, grabbed the cane, limped out of the door, limped into his car, drove through the dull streets and checked into the best hotel in the city with the intention of only leaving when he felt like himself again.

To remove Cuddy from his heart the man did everything and experimented with everything. His imagination didn't fail him in that hour of need. Neither did the money. Imagination and money were a powerful combination all by themselves, throw into the mixture an iron drive, and what was powerful would become explosive. Hookers, drink, food walked in and out of his hotel room at a furious speed. The man indulged himself with various extravagances and eccentricities. He didn't hold himself back. He had the means, he had the will, he had no intention to stop.

He had told himself he was having fun, he had told that to the others, he had told Wilson that it was a matter of time, that things would return to normal, that he would go back to his old life. The man could say whatever he wanted. He was not having fun. It was not joy what he was feeling, he knew it, deep down inside he knew it. It was despair in disguise, sadness with a makeup. It was pain. It was emptiness.

He started the week with no intention of setting foot in the hospital. But he couldn't help having an epiphany on the balcony of his hotel room. A crazy idea that had proven right. A genius thought that only he could have had. A brilliant deduction that had saved his patient's life. The man hadn't been able to feel any enthusiasm or pride. Medicine had become a mechanical thing to him. The man's brain was a machine with two slots, in one the patient file went in, the diagnosis would come out through the other. The man could now finally aspire to the noble condition of being a robot. A mechanical person. A medical machine. It was what she had reduced him to. Hope, happiness, humanity, desire, music, curiosity, interest for medical cases, interest in finding the truth, everything had gone with the wind. It belonged to the past.

When the man returned to the hotel coming from the hospital and sat on his bed, he took a good look at the spoils of his recent activities that were scattered here and there – a champagne bottle on the floor, some woman's underwear hanging on the lamp, Vicodin pills on the sheets –, it was a sad depressing spectacle. And he felt that no matter how much he tried to move on he would never be able to leave the same place. He was a mouse in a training wheel. He was moving but not going anywhere. It was a kind of standing still but in motion. That hotel room was his soul: a dark space, filled with the remains of the day, useless things, used and abused, loose memories of meaningless events, garbage. He was stuck in there.

What do we call a fantasy that becomes reality?

A _nightmare. We call it a nightmare_.


	13. Chapter 13

XIII

Life went on. A certain kind of life.

One day, the man learnt that research on muscle growth was being conducted on rats, using an experimental drug. An old idea came to his mind. An idea long hidden in one corner of his brain but never completely forgotten. The idea that he could regain the muscle of his leg and that he could walk again without the need of a cane. He had tried that before with ketamine, but that had failed. Maybe it was time to try again. What did he have to lose?

He took the research studies and went home. He read and re-read them and searched for specific information: the muscle development; the side-effects; the success rates. The drug seemed promising. Of course the research was only in the early stages. It hadn't been used in humans yet and, according to the investigation reports, that stage was not going to start in the near future. But the man couldn't wait. He didn't want to wait. As soon as he knew about the experiment, the possibility of a cure for his leg seized his thoughts. If he could not have the woman he wanted, the least he could do was try not to be a cripple for the rest of his life. Something needed to happen in his favour, the man thought. How could someone love a cripple? The drug was his chance to live a normal life. A small chance surely but he had already spent too many chips and he didn't have many more in his pocket to gamble with. And time was running out. He had to jump from the plane, not caring if his parachute was safe or not, or even if he was wearing one. The time had come for Gregory House to try another change.

To be able to walk freely, without limitations. To be able to run. The man savoured those feelings in his mind. He could almost taste them. He imagined himself going for a walk, with no cane, with no pain. Ah, for him to be able to have that he was willing to do anything, to risk everything. And maybe, who knows, with the cure for the leg would come the cure for the soul. If he could feel like a new man, he could be a new man, and everything would make sense again. He would be whole again. With time he could even try to love again.

After the decision had been made, the man didn't hesitate to act. He withdrew small samples of the drug from the PPTH laboratory and started injecting them regularly, watching the progress and comparing his development to that of the lab rats. He did all this in secrecy. He didn't tell anyone, not even Wilson. Least of all Wilson. This procedure was of a highly private nature, it didn't concern others. Only the man knew what meant for him, what it was at stake. It was his leg, his life, he didn't need to listen to sermons from anyone, he didn't need for someone to come to him and tell him about the insanity of injecting himself with a drug only tested on rats. And he surely didn't need to hear others explaining to him the reasons why he, Gregory House, was doing what he was doing in the first place. As if the others could possibly understand what he was going through, as if they had an inkling of how he thought and saw the world. The condescendence, the pride, the supreme stupidity on Wilson's part whenever he tried to guess the reasons behind the man's actions was almost insulting. Like an ant trying to understand an elephant. The man had no patience for it. He was on a mission of rescue, of his health, of his humanity, and he would go all the way, to the last consequences. He was a boxer who refused to lie down in the ring, waiting for the final countdown. He thought that there was, at least, one last fight in him. If the drug turned out to be a failure, what can one do? It was another failed attempt, to go into the same drawer where his past failures rested, another cross in the man's book. But if the drug turned out to be a success…

Days passed without the man noticing any progress. His leg movements were still limited. He tried his leg resistance every day, under agonizing pain, but he couldn't see any improvements. His leg was the same.

The others eventually found out what he was doing… blah, blah, blah, they made some noise, each of them spoke their piece. Thirteen called him an idiot. Wilson told him that he was trying to fix the symptoms instead of the disease, whatever that meant. The man didn't pay attention. He continued to persevere, to do the exercises until the time came that even he had to admit to himself that the drug was not working. With resignation, he had dropped the last drug samples into the garbage and thought "what now?" What alternatives were left for him now? _The mouse continued inexorably his cycle_.

Then, a miracle happened. During a fortuitous event, the man discovered that his leg was indeed improving. He could move it with ease, he could lift weights. The pain had diminished until it almost disappeared. The man smiled. It was working. It was working! He had rushed to the hospital and taken more samples from the laboratory. He felt invincible again.

_The mouse continued running in its training wheel. Without stopping, without slowing down._

And the cycle began again.

One day his leg failed him. The man went to talk to the scientist responsible for the experiment and found out that the research was a failure, that the drug, with time, instead of growing muscle caused tumours to appear. Soon, the man found out that the same had happened to him. Tiny tumours existed now in what was left of the muscle in his leg. Little invaders growing inside him. Three, more precisely. He had detected three. And it was necessary to remove them. But where? In the hospital? No. He had tried the drug in secret, it would be in secret that he would deal with the consequences.

Alone, in his bathroom, the man prepared methodically for the surgery. He disinfected the floor, the bathtub, …, he hung the CT scans on the wall, he placed the anaesthesia needles near him, a towel for the sweat on the border of the tub, … Scalpel, magnifying glass, _betadine_, gloves, cotton wool, wipes, assorted material, cell phone,… the man thought about everything and foresaw everything.

He laid down in the bathtub and looked at his bare leg, at the scar that was there. The huge and twisted scar made of parts of soft skin and parts of rough skin. A patchwork of flesh. It ran along his right leg like a river across a valley. That was the man's secret landscape. His private abyss. His piece of the Real.

One day someone had kissed that scar. Not anymore. Now he was going to enter it. He was going to cut through flesh and muscle and snatch the tumours that lived in the dark. He was going to disfigure even more what was already misshapen.

The man was scared, but he drew a deep breath, looked at the scan where the localization of the tumours was signalled, grabbed the scalpel and started cutting.

Blood and pain. Everything was blood and pain. The man almost could not see what he was doing due to the sweat that was pouring down his forehead. His hands were shaking uncontrollably, all of him was shaking. He had managed to remove one of the tumours and he was going after the second. His teeth were clenched and an agonized expression was stamped on his face. He tried several times to approach the scalpel to the great gorge, made of red and black, that was open before him, but the pain was too much, it was unbearable. All his being was screaming "Stop! No more!" A thought flashed through his mind: "You are going to die in here. Alone, in this bathtub, covered in your own blood. What a great death for the great doctor." The man panicked. He grabbed the phone and called Wilson… nothing… he called Taub… nothing… one by one he called all his team members… nothing… until, in desperation, the man called the last person with whom he wanted to talk. And she picked up the call. And she came to his aid.

When the man saw Cuddy he noticed concern in her voice but also something else. Could it be boredom for being there? For having to abandon the comfort of her house, of her bed, to go help some lunatic who decided it was a good time to bleed to death in his own bathroom? A shadow of despair grew in the man's heart when he perceived, by looking into her eyes, the inconvenience he had become to her. Not really a shadow, more like a shadow of a shadow; the pain and the predicament he was in prevented the man wasting time with this type of indulgence. Nevertheless, no matter how brief it was, the feeling appeared and went straight into the man's soul.

After some discussion, Cuddy took him to the hospital, for him to have the surgery there. She was by his side in the ER and, by the man's request, she assisted the operation. But she was not in his room in the morning, when the man woke up. Wilson was.

_Wilson._

The loyal friend. The companion of all hours. He could always lean on Wilson. _Always?_ Almost always. For Wilson too, the man was an inconvenience. Now that he was locked inside a prison, that problem was solved for good, he guessed.

The pain in his leg that had been increasing in accordance with the man's reminiscences had become a continuous ardour after the man had taken the second Vicodin of the night. His right hand had ceased its continuous up and down movement along the leg and rested now on top of the scar. It was time for the man to remember events that he would rather forget. Events that shamed him deeply. Events that he wished had never happened. But one cannot erase the past.

Who was he? Who was Gregory House? Sometimes the man asked this question, in moments of sullen introspection. He was not in search of a specific answer because he knew that Gregory House was a lot of things. A lot of contradictory things. A battle. That was what he felt he was. An endless battle. A nitroglycerine bottle on a table. Harmless at first sight but capable of exploding at the minimum stimulus, at the slightest vibration. Unstable matter in the highest degree.

After the separation, something started growing inside of him, like a weed. Something dark and twisted, that came from the mud of his soul. Something that had fangs and horns and seemed unstoppable. A dangerous thing. Anger perhaps. The obsession with his leg had been only a manifestation of that anger.

When the man awoke in the hospital, on the morning after the surgery, he knew that his rage was still there and he had no idea how to get rid of it. It was a knot in his stomach, a knot in his heart. He had to learn to live with it. He didn't know if he could do it. He wished to get rid of that sentiment. It was only what he wished. A simple desire. Simpler than trying a cure for his leg, way simpler than performing surgery on himself. But it seemed impossible. He felt he couldn't make that thing disappear. He felt he was condemned to carry that anger until… when? The end?

The man and Cuddy didn't have a serious conversation since they broke up. An exchange of words here and there and that was all. Nothing of relevance. All of a sudden, to the man's great surprise, Cuddy decided the time had come for them to talk. _She_ decided. Just like it was she that had decided to break up with him. What he wanted was insignificant in Cuddy's mind. She decided and that was enough. The man saw himself trapped. If he ran away from the conversation he was immature, if he accepted talking to her what he was going to say? What was there to say that his actions alone had not said already? Cuddy didn't seek an explanation, Cuddy sought an absolution. And the man gave her that absolution. "It was not your fault", he said to her.

_"It was not your fault."_

Those were the last words she would hear from his mouth. Those words resounded still in the man's memory. Deep inside. Maybe they meant an acceptance on his part of some flaw that existed inside of him. Maybe that was the man's way of saying to Cuddy that their break up was an inevitability, that if it had not happened then, it would have happened some other time, over some other thing. Maybe he was trying to say that it was not his fault for being the way he was and that it was not her fault for being the way she was.

He also told her that he felt hurt. And he was indeed hurt. At the end of the day, while returning home, the man started to think about what had happened since Cuddy had taken him to the hospital. He started to remember with fondness the moments he had shared with her.

During that day he had had a patient who had chosen to quit her art so she could stay with her lover. The man had been angry. He had understood his patient's gesture as an abandonment of herself in favour of another, another who would probably end up leaving her again anyway. In a way, the man had seen in the patient's predicament the mirror of his own dilemma. Maybe it was he who had been wrong and the patient right. Maybe he should try and approach Cuddy. Maybe it was time to admit to himself the emptiness he had been living in, to admit that there was something he wished to have. Maybe this was the time to go in search of that desire.

While the man was musing about this, Wilson came to invite him to go for a drink. The man remembered that Cuddy had asked him to return some things she had forgotten in his house. Of those things, he could only recall a hairbrush. He limped to a nearby shelf, picked up the brush and left with Wilson.

Before they went to the bar, the man stopped the car in front of Cuddy's house. He left the car and, with the brush in his hand, started walking up the path that lead to her front door. In the middle of it, he looked at the dining room window and stopped. Inside a dinner was in progress. Cuddy's sister, her husband (or boyfriend, the man didn't know) and another man were the guests. The meal was near the end and Cuddy was gathering the dishes. She was standing up and at her side was the other man. Both of them were smiling. Cuddy put her hand on the stranger's arm. Something cracked inside the man's, as if a spring had broken loose.

In the past, the man used to look through the glass walls of the patients' rooms, at the life that was happening inside. He had seen sons embracing their parents, parents ignoring their sons, wives confessing to her husbands, husbands forgiving their wives, friends making amends. He had seen desertions, fights, love, indifference, hope, despair, loneliness. He had absorbed everything, he had kept everything in his memory, as if those things only happened to others, not to him. He was always on the outside looking in.

Earlier that day he had looked into the patient's room and saw her happy with her boyfriend. Now he was seeing the woman he loved making a gesture that she used with him so many times. Only this time the object of her affection was another. The life he was looking at through Cuddy's window was the life he wanted. It should have been him in there, inside the house, laughing with the others, happy. Not looking in from outside, from the garden. But someone had usurped his place. Someone had stolen what he felt was his by right.

At that instant the man realized that he was not really looking at Cuddy's window. He was looking at his fantasy turning reality in front of his eyes. Displayed for him, like a painting in a gallery. He was looking at his desire. But where was he? Where was he in that scenario? He was not there. He was _not _there. The man was looking at his own absence. At his own empty spot. And it was that realization that froze his soul. And the thing that lived inside of him screamed.

The man turned around and walked down the path and got inside the car and told Wilson to leave the car and yelled at Wilson to leave the car and Wilson left the car and the man pull off at full speed and the car arrived at the end of the street and the man turned the car one hundred and eighty degrees and stopped and looked at Cuddy's house. And thought.

What he thought lasted one brief moment. A nothingness. In real time, only mere seconds. In psychological time, a lifetime, or better, several lives. Alternative roads crossed the man's mind. In one of them he saw himself driving to the house, picking up Wilson, going with him to a bar and getting drunk. And do the same thing the next day, and the day after that one, and the day after that, until he would waste himself away in an infinite succession of bars and booze and drunkenness. That was no life. That was death in slow motion. The other road was… the man stared at the house, at the white wall, at the window… the other road implied an act of courage, an act of affirmation and of freedom. He had to transpose his fantasy, to cut all the illusions, all the lies. The man knew that act would be at the same time a death and a rebirth. It was also a necessity. If he wanted to live. And he wanted to.

The man pressed on gas and drove the car with increasing speed into the house, breaking wall and window and entering through Cuddy's dining room with sound and fury. The room was empty. Cuddy and her guests had already left it, but they returned as soon as they heard the noise. The car had stopped in the middle of rubble, smoke, plaster, broken glass, broken furniture. The man got out of the car and walked in Cuddy's direction and held out the hairbrush and she grabbed it. She looked stunned. Then, he turned his back to her and left through the front door, under Wilson's astonishing gaze. The deed was done. The man had said goodbye to Cuddy forever.

The man was free. The man felt free, there on the beach, looking at a blue sea. He was remembering one time, when he was a child, of being in front of another sea in another place. At that time, the tide was high and huge waves, tall as skyscrapers, smashed and clashed against the walls of a cave. He was at this cave's entrance. A little boy facing the tempestuous sea, fascinated with the violence of the waves, with their rhythm, rumble, speed, white foam splashed in the air. He had not been afraid. He knew that no wave was going to snatch him and take him under, to the bottom of the ocean. At that time he had felt invincible, he had felt immortal, he had felt as powerful as the sea itself. The man was four years old.

Now, looking at the quiet sea that stretched before him, the man remembered the boy he had been and the feelings that afternoon had left in his memory.

The man walked to the edge of the sea. The water almost touched his sneakers. The thing inside of him wasn't suffocating him any more. Perhaps it had disappeared or it was hiding in some dark recess of his heart, waiting, like a moray in its hole.

The man had the impulse to continue walking straight ahead. To dive into the waves and let them take him. To float between the foam, to follow the wave's movements and curls, to feel the salt water on his skin, to listen to the deep sound of the sea pounding in his ears. To be the sea. To be that huge mass of water that surrounds the earth. The blue of his eyes would be the blue of the sea, and to that blue several other hues and values would be adding. And his eyes would not only be blue, but would be blue-green, blue-orange, blue-gray, blue-red, blue-yellow. The greatness of his soul would mix with the greatness of the sea: endless, deep, insurmountable, eternal, alive. The sound of his voice would be the sound of the waves breaking against the rocks. His fingers would be tangled seaweed where small creatures would hide. His eyes would be the eyes of all the fish, present and past. The stars would dance above his liquid head and the moonlight would sprinkle his face with bright silver threads.

The man smiled. Then he continued walking along the water's edge, leaving a trail of footprints in the sand. Far away, on the horizon, the sun was setting.


	14. Chapter 14

XIV

After the man crashed his car into Cuddy's dining room, he went to the Fiji islands and stayed there for three months. When he returned to the United States, the man gave himself up to the authorities, dismissed the help of a lawyer, appeared in court, listened in silence to what the judge had to say and prepared himself to spend the next eight months in prison.

He felt that what he had done had been a necessity, a liberation of sorts. An ending to a new beginning. But not everything had ended with his gesture. Something had remained, a small leftover, a grain of sand. Shame perhaps. Or sadness. Or a mixture of the two.

He had been Cuddy's friend for many years. Almost a lifetime. They had been colleagues in college, and after that, colleagues in the same hospital. Throughout those years, they had argued a lot, but they also had laughed a lot, played pranks on each other, had fun together. He had pleasure in her company. He was going to miss her.

The man thought, not without sorrow, that if by chance he would meet her again, she would come to him as a stranger, no more the lover, no more the friend. A stranger full of anger, full of resentment. Perhaps she would come to him as an enemy.

That's why the last thing the man wanted was to see Cuddy again. He couldn't stand to imagine the way she would look at him, to imagine what he would read in her eyes. The violence of his action couldn't be erased, he was conscious of that. Echoes of it would last for a long time, like circles in the water after a stone had been thrown. He didn't expect forgiveness.

The man's first days in prison were spent watching. From morning, when he stepped out of his cell, to night-time, the man paid close attention to the habits and routines of everyone. By the end of the first week he had memorized the schedule of every guard, who was on which shift, who was nice, who was nasty; how many groups of prisoners there were, who were their leaders, what was their hierarchy, who was dangerous and who was helpful, who was doing favours to whom, and what those favours were, who was to be trusted and who could be a potential threat. Everything he mentally catalogued for future reference.

The man used to sit, alone, in the prison social centre, looking at the comings and goings of prisoners, guards and other personnel. He looked at the row of people waiting for their meds to be delivered. He knew what each of one of those persons was thinking about, what they were going to do thirty seconds, fifteen minutes, one hour, from this moment on. He watched them so intently that their bodies disappeared under his gaze and what he saw was their trajectories in time and space, like vectors that passed, crossed and collided. The persons were particles and everything was mathematics.

The prison was an enormous hierarchical structure. On the bottom there were the common prisoners, the old, the weak, afterwards would come the strong, the enforcers, then the leaders of the several groups, then the guards, the guards supervisors, the director of the prison, and, looming above them all, the Law. The supreme Law.

In the past, someone had told him that he was not above the law. It was fair to assume that the events that had occurred were proof enough of the truth of that affirmation. No, the man was not above the law. That fact was painfully obvious. But he didn't feel that he was below it either, not the way he saw it, as a collection of rules made by a small group of men to control the crowds. To the man, the law was not about justice or the truth. The law was about power and control. And he knew everything about power and control. About having them and losing them.

The only law the man recognized was his own. That was the reason why he had come back to the States, why he had refused a lawyer, why he was now in jail. Because he had found himself guilty. There was no need for a judge to condemn him. He already had done that in the more strict court of his own consciousness. The man was the only prisoner in jail by his own accord.

He was not above the law, or under it. In a strange way, he was more in parallel to it. He existed apart of it. Again, the man was looking from the outside into the inside, even if "outside" was a figure of speech and he literally was "inside" now.

When the man observed prison life, he saw in his mind the huge building that was the system, like a knight in shining white armour and spear in his hand facing a tower so big it pierced the sky and its top was lost beyond the clouds. That tower was his enemy. Knight and tower, locked in a perpetual dance throughout time.

Now the knight was inside the tower. No more dressed in white but in greyish blue. No more wearing an armour. Cotton was the fabric of his garments.

After the first weeks of thorough observation, the man started to immerse himself in the daily prison routine. He started talking with the other inmates, trying to find possible allies. He tried also to be useful because usefulness was one of the ways a person with no friends could survive inside those walls.

He became a janitor. During the day, the man followed the program. He limped through the corridors, wheeling the cleaning material, scrubbing the floors, washing the bathrooms, becoming, both in body as in spirit, the true heir to the _buraku _that inspired him so long ago. Occasionally he played chess with one of the prisoners, a man named Frankie. He was the closest thing to a friend the man had in there. During the night, or in his solitary hours, the man listened to music, read a lot and studied Physics.

The man had an idea of what he was going to do as soon as he was released. An idea that implied to begin everything all over again; in an even a more radical way than in other times of change. The man was going to create a completely blank slate, _tabula rasa,_ of everything that he had been in the past. Friend, profession, city, country… he was going to leave everything behind, he was going to ditch everything like someone tossing away old clothes that he is tired of wearing.

The man didn't want to be a doctor anymore. Being a doctor reminded him of his old life. He wanted to start anew. No, no more medicine for him. He was going to employ his talent in other things. As soon as he was out of there, he was going to get a PhD and become a Physics teacher on the Fiji islands. The man intended to prove the existence of Dark Matter, that elusive substance nobody could see but whose presence conditioned the motion of planets and starts. If someone could achieve that feat that someone was certainly the man. Who else was more knowledgeable of the dark that existed in every thing large or small, of the dark that resided in the heart of all men?

Hence the man's wall in his cell, the wall nearest his cot, was full of mathematical calculations and Physics graphics. The man kept himself busy in this way. It was good for him, for his obsessive nature, to have a clear objective to guide his thoughts. It was a way to cope with the life he led, with the routine, the bullying, the violence, the humiliation of seeing himself destitute of any power or influence; no more the head of a department in a big hospital, no more the world renowned doctor, no more the last resort of so many patients. Inside the prison he was only House, not Doctor House. House, the middle age cripple who cleaned the latrines and who sometimes showed glimpses of rebelliousness, promptly squashed, by the guards or by the other prisoners. It had been a harsh fall. But the man was a specialist in falls and resurrections. He knew the prison was only a passage, a mere station where the train had temporarily stopped. Soon, it would be moving again.

The doctor was dead. Buried beneath Cuddy's dining room rubble. Saving lives had ceased to interest him. The man was fed up. He was going to find the Truth elsewhere from now on.

On a certain day, the man was in the prison clinic when he heard two doctors talking about a clinical case. One of the doctors was the chief prison doctor, the other one, probably his assistant, was a young woman, very pretty. The man was paying attention to the conversation and every now and then he suggested something to the differential diagnostics. Flashes of the old days crossed his mind. The older doctor didn't interest him. But the younger… The man asked himself what she was doing in there. She didn't seem the type of doctor one would find in a prison clinic. The woman was an anomaly, and he loved anomalies.

The young doctor's history aroused his curiosity as much as the clinic case. Her name was Adams and the man could see right from the start that she had ambition and a willingness to make a difference. She also had guts to defy authority, as the man would discover later. Adams' interest for Medicine, for helping people (it was because of that she became a prison doctor, clearly a case of Mother Theresa syndrome), contrasted with the man's disillusion. Perhaps it had been her presence, the fact that she had become curious and had read his file, the fact that she knew who he had been, what he had done, and still was capable of recognizing the potential for good that was inside of him, that had led the man to become progressively involved with the patient's case. Adams spurred him, she challenged him by saying that he had a gift and that gift shouldn't be wasted, that the mysteries of the Universe, which the man was so interested in, were nothing compared to the mysteries of humanity.

The disciplinary board had given the man one week, by the end of which he would regain his freedom, _if_ he could stay out of trouble during that time. One week. They might as well give him an eternity; it wouldn't have made any difference. Trouble seemed to follow the man wherever he went even when he tried to avoid it, sometimes it happened _when _he avoided it on purpose, as if the man was a giant magnet perpetually attracting chaos.

That week was no exception. On the first day, the chief of one of the gangs, an old sadistic man called Mendelson, covered with swastika tattoos, had told the man that he had to give him, by the end of the week, twenty Vicodin pills. Just to reinforce the importance of the _request _in the man's mind, Mendelson had sent his gorillas to beat him up. It was a tricky business. The doses that they gave the man daily, even if he kept them and never took any, would never add up to twenty pills by the week's end. For him to be able to get the twenty he needed first, to endure the pain, and second, to get hold of more meds. To be able to do that, the man had to put to use all his cunning, smartness and imagination.

To complicate things further, he started to become obsessed with the patient's case. At night, he no longer did mathematical exercises. Instead, he would compile list of symptoms on the bottom board of the cot above. The doctor's demise had been announced too soon.

When the end of the week arrived, the man had not been able to acquire the Vicodin but he had arrived at a possible diagnosis. To be able to prove it, the patient needed to take an aspirin. If the result was a heart attack, the man's diagnostic was correct. They had refused him access to the clinic, so he needed to find a way of entering there by other ways. On the last day of the week, the man challenged Mendelson in the cafeteria, provoked a riot, took a beating and was sent to the clinic. Mendelson was sent to solitary.

As soon as the man saw himself inside the clinic, he locked the door. Besides him, the only people there were Adams and the patient. It was the right moment. The man crushed the aspirin and dropped the resulting powder in a cup filled with water. He gave the cup to the patient. The patient hesitated for a moment and that hesitation was fatal. During those few seconds the guards managed to break the door down and grab the man, taking him away from the patient. The cup was still in the patient's hand. The man tried to free himself but was overpowered by the number and the force of the guards. One of them grabbed the cup from the patient and put it on a table. Everything was lost.

They were going to take the man away when something extraordinary happened. Adams, who up until that point had remained motionless, seized the cup, gave it to the patient and the patient drank its content. The prison doctor, who had entered with the guards, immediately fired her. She didn't care. All eyes were fixed on the patient. Never was a heart attack awaited with so much expectancy, with so much desire even. Fifteen seconds… half a minute… one minute... nothing. The guards dragged the man out of there while he shouted that it was still too early. He was sent into solitary confinement. The possibility of an early release was gone. The prison would remain his home for the next months.

Because he had wanted to save a man's life, because he had returned to thinking like a doctor, to acting like a doctor, because he had searched for the truth, and in doing so, he had defied authority, the man was back in the dark. It was ironic. Almost comical. The man could hear the distinct sound of laughter in the air. _Fate is a bitch_.

But what bothered him more was the fact that he had never found out if his diagnosis was the correct one or not. Possibly not. Possibly the man had been wrong and everything he had done was in vain, had no meaning. It had cost him his freedom, it had cost a good doctor, someone who had trusted him, her job. Only because he had fallen in love with Medicine again, with the rush of finding the right answer. Only because he had wanted to _know_. Perhaps this was the way fate had of telling him that his earlier decision of giving up Medicine had been the right one, after all. Perhaps he was no longer the man he once had been, the doctor he once was. He had been inactive for too long.

The next day, by lunch time, a hatch at the bottom of the door was opened and a tray slid across the floor. The hatch closed again. The man rose, looked at the tray and noticed on it, next to the food, a piece of paper. He grabbed the paper, unfolded it and, with eyes accustomed to the semi-darkness of the cell, read what was written on it. A slight smile appeared on his face.

"You were right", was the text scribbled on the paper.

He had been right. A wave of relief washed over the man. The gift was still there, untouched. He was still the genius doctor of the past. Nothing had changed.

* * *

Now.

The man had revised, in one night, the major moments of his life. The great victories, the even greater defeats. The past lovers. It had been a fulfilled life, he had to admit it. Although he had the impression that it had been less of a life and more a collection of accidents. Perhaps there was no great difference between the two after all. It didn't matter. He was going to get out of prison and he needed to decide what he was going to do as soon as he regained his freedom. Going back to the hospital was out of the question. But the man wanted to continue to be a doctor. It was in his nature. And it was useless to fight one's own nature. He had already wasted too much energy trying to do that.

After his release, the man would continue to practice medicine. First thing he would do was to find Wilson, ask for forgiveness and try to salvage as much as possible of his old friendship. Afterwards… afterwards he would go wherever chance would lead him.

The man was serene, lying in his cell. He was looking at the dark. There was still a last memory to evoke.

He thought of Cuddy and her face appeared to him. Ethereal like a ghost but nevertheless distinct. She looked like she was made of silver filaments.

Cuddy smiled at the man. He didn't smile back. He was looking at her with an intent gaze, memorizing every feature of her face: the curve of her chin, the expression of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the beauty of her smile (he had missed that smile).

The man lifted his right arm and with his hand very delicately caressed Cuddy's face. Sadness filled his heart. He remained like that, looking at the apparition, for a moment more. Then he murmured: "Enough". He made a gesture with his fingers and the figure vanished.

The man dropped his arm but continued looking at the darkness, as if it was something solid. He wanted to pierce the darkness to reveal the true dark that lurked behind it. The heart of the darkness. He wanted the dark to hear him.

He said out loud and with a clear voice: "No more changes, no more fixing, no more searches for meaning. I am a cripple. I will always be a cripple. I am in pain. I will always be in pain. I am selfish. I am miserable. I am a mess. I will probably be a mess until the end of my days. I am a doctor. I am alone. All this I am and I accept what I am. Now and forever."

The man stopped for a moment but didn't avert his gaze. He kept looking steadily in front of him. His look changed to an expression of challenge and his mouth widened in a dangerous smile. "I am here and I will continue to be here. Come and get me… if you can."

Silence was the answer.

The man closed his eyes and fell asleep.

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was proofread by Amy and BabalooBlue.


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